Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  “Studying this is sort of a pie-eating contest,” Arsibalt began.

  This was a Fluccish expression that Lio, Jesry, Arsibalt, and I used to mean a long thankless trudge through a pile of books. It completely wrong-footed Beller, who thought we were talking of scones, and so here Arsibalt had to spend a minute or two disentangling these two baked-goods references.

  “I’ll try to sketch it out,” Arsibalt continued, once they’d gotten back on track. “Sconic thought was a third way between two unacceptable alternatives. By then it was well understood that we do all of our thinking up here in our brains.” He tapped his head. “And that the brain gets its inputs from eyes, ears, and other sense organs. The naïve attitude is that your brain works directly with the real world. I look at this button on your control panel, I reach out and feel it with my hand—”

  “Don’t touch that!” Beller warned.

  “I see you seeing it and having thoughts about it, and I conclude that it’s really there, just as my eyes and fingers present it to me, and that when I think about it I’m thinking about the real thing.”

  “That all seems pretty obvious,” Beller said.

  Then there was an awkward silence, which Beller finally broke by saying—in good humor—“I guess that’s why you called it naïve.”

  “At the opposite extreme, there were those who argued that everything we think we know about the world outside of our skulls is an illusion.”

  “Seems kind of smart-alecky more than anything else,” Beller said after considering it for a bit.

  “The Sconics didn’t much care for it either. As I said, they developed a third attitude. ‘When we think about the world—or about almost anything—’ they said, ‘what we are really thinking about is a bunch of data—givens—that have reached our brains from our eyes and ears and so forth.’ To go back to my example, I am given a visual image of that button and I am given a memory of what it felt like when I touched it, but that’s all I have to work with, as far as that button is concerned—it is impossible, unthinkable, for my brain to come to grips with the actual, physical button in and of itself because my brain simply does not have access to it. All that my brain can ever work with are the look and the feel—givens piped into our nerves.”

  “Well, I guess I see the point. It doesn’t have that smart-aleckiness of the other one you mentioned. But it seems like a distinction without a difference,” Beller said.

  “It’s not,” Arsibalt said. “And here is where the pie-eating contest would begin, if you wanted to understand why it’s not. Because, starting from this idea, the Sconics went on to develop a whole metatheorical system. It was so influential that no one has been able to do metatheorics since then without coming to grips with it. All subsequent metatheorics is a refutation, an amendment, or an extension of Sconic thought. And one of the most important conclusions you arrive at, if you make it to the end of the pie-eating contest, is that—”

  “There is no God?”

  “No, something different, and harder to sum up, which is that certain topics are simply out of bounds. The existence of God is one of those.”

  “What do you mean, out of bounds?”

  “If you follow through the logical arguments of the Sconic system, you are led to the conclusion that our minds can’t think in a productive or useful way about God, if by God you mean the Bazian Orthodox God which is clearly not spatiotemporal—not existing in space and time, that is.”

  “But God exists everywhere and in all times,” Beller said.

  “But what does it really mean to say that? Your God is more than this road, and that mountain, and all the other physical objects in the universe put together, isn’t He?”

  “Sure. Of course. Otherwise we’d just be nature-worshippers or something.”

  “So it’s crucial to your definition of God that He is more than just a big pile of stuff.”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, that ‘more’ is by definition outside of space of time. And the Sconics demonstrated that we simply cannot think in a useful way about anything that, in principle, can’t be experienced through our senses. And I can already see from the look on your face that you don’t agree.”

  “I don’t!” Beller affirmed.

  “But that’s beside the point. The point is that, after the Sconics, the kinds of people who did theorics and metatheorics stopped talking about God and certain other topics such as free will and what existed before the universe. And that is what I mean by the Sconic Discipline. By the time of the Reconstitution it had become in-grained. It was incorporated into our Discipline without much discussion, or even conscious awareness.”

  “Well, but with all the free time you’ve got—sitting there in your concents—couldn’t someone be troubled in four thousand years to be aware of it? To discuss it?”

  “We have less free time than you imagine,” Arsibalt said gently, “but nevertheless, many people have devoted much thought to the matter, and founded Orders devoted to denying God, or believing in Him, and currents have surged back and forth in and among the maths. But none of it seems to have moved us away from the basic position of the Sconics.”

  “Do you believe in God?” Beller asked flat-out.

  I leaned forward, fascinated.

  “I have been reading a lot, lately, about things that are non-spatiotemporal—yet believed to exist.” By this, I knew he meant mathematical objects in the Hylaean Theoric World.

  “Doesn’t that go against the Sconic Discipline?” Beller asked.

  “Yes,” Arsibalt said, “but that is perfectly all right, as long as one isn’t going about it in a naïve way—as if Lady Baritoe had never written a word. A common complaint made about the Sconics is that they didn’t know much about pure theorics. Many theoricians, looking at Baritoe’s works, say ‘wait just a minute, there’s something missing here—we can relate directly to non-spatiotemporal objects when we prove theorems and so on.’ The stuff I’ve been reading lately is all about that.”

  “So you can see God by doing theorics?”

  “Not God,” Arsibalt said, “not a God that any ark would recognize.”

  After that he managed to change the subject. He—like I—had wondered what the Powers That Be might have told Ferman and the others when they had put out the call for volunteers.

  The answer seemed to be: not much. The Saecular Power needed some sort of puzzle solved—the sort of thing that avout were good at. Some fraas and suurs would have to be moved from Point A to Point B so that they could work on this conundrum. People like Ferman Beller were naturally curious about us. They had all learned about the Reconstitution in their suvins, and they understood that we had an assigned role to play, however sporadically, in making their civilization work. They were fascinated to see the mechanism being invoked, at least once in their lives, and were proud to be a part of it even if they hadn’t a clue as to why it was being engaged.

  In the hottest part of the afternoon we pulled off into the shade of a line of trees that had once served as wind-break for a farm compound, now collapsed. We hadn’t seen Crade in hours, but Cord’s fetch was right behind us. Some of us walked around and some dozed. The mountains darkened the northwestern sky, though if you didn’t know what they were you might mistake them for a storm front. On their opposite slope they caught most of the moisture blowing in from the ocean and funneled it into the river that ran through our concent. Consequently this side was arid. Only bunchgrass and low fragrant shrubs would grow here of their own accord. From age to age the Saecular Power would irrigate it and people would live here growing grain and legumes, but we were now on the wane of such a cycle, as was obvious from the condition of the roads, the farmsteads, and what were shown on the cartabla as towns. The old irrigation ditches were fouled by whatever would grow in them, which was mostly things with thorns, spines, and detachable burrs. Lio and I went for a brisk walk along one of these, but we didn’t say much as we were keeping an eye out for snakes.


  Sammann kept looking as if he had something to say. We decided on a shake-up that put me and him in Cord’s fetch, while Lio and Barb went to Ferman’s mobe. Barb wanted to stay with Jad but we all knew that Jad must be getting a little weary of his company and so we insisted. Cord was tired of driving, so Rosk took the controls.

  “Ferman Beller is communicating with a Bazian installation on one of those mountains,” Sammann told me.

  This was an odd phrasing, since Baz had been sacked fifty-two hundred years ago. “As in Bazian Orthodox?” I asked.

  Sammann rolled his eyes. “Yes.”

  “A religious institution?”

  “Or something.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Never mind. I just thought you might want to know that Ganelial Crade isn’t the only one with an agenda.”

  I considered asking Sammann what his agenda was but decided to let it drop. He was probably wondering how a bunch of Bazian priests would treat an Ita.

  My agenda was looking at the photomnenomic tablet, which I knew that everyone in this vehicle—except for Cord, who’d been driving—must have been studying. I’d only had a brief look at it before. Cord and I sat together in the back. The sun was shining in so we threw a blanket over our heads and huddled in the dark like a couple of kids playing campout.

  This thing that Orolo had wanted so badly to take pictures of: would it be something that we would recognize as a ship? Until Sammann had showed me this tablet a few hours ago, all I had known was that it used bursts of plasma to change its velocity and that it could shine red lasers on things. For all I’d known, it could have been a hollowed-out asteroid. It could have been an alien life form, adapted to live in the vacuum of space, that shot bombs out of a sphincter. It could have been constructed out of things that we would not even recognize as matter; it could have been only half in this universe and half in some other. So I had made an effort to open my mind. I had been prepared to be confronted by some sort of image that I would not be able to understand at first. And it had, indeed, been a riddle. But not the kind of riddle I’d been expecting. I hadn’t had time to study it, to puzzle over it, at the time. Now I had a good long look.

  The image was streaked in the direction of the ship’s motion. Fraa Orolo had probably set up the telescope to track it across the sky, but he’d had to make his best guess as to its direction and speed, and he hadn’t gotten it exactly right, hence the motion blur. I guessed that this was only the last in a series of such images that Orolo had been making during the weeks leading up to Apert, each slightly better than the last as he learned how to track the target and how to calibrate the exposure. Sammann had already applied some kind of syntactic process to the image to reduce the blur and bring out many details that would have been lost otherwise.

  It was an icosahedron. Twenty faces, each of them an equilateral triangle. That much I’d seen when Sammann had first shown it to me. And therein lay the puzzle, because such a shape could be either natural or artificial. Geometers loved icosahedrons, but so did nature; viruses, spores, and pollens had all been known to take this shape. So perhaps it was a space-adapted life form, or a giant crystal that had grown in a gas cloud.

  “This thing can’t be pressurized,” I pointed out.

  “Because the surfaces are all flat?” Cord said—more as statement than question. She dealt with compressed gases in her work, and knew in her bones that any vessel containing pressure must be rounded: a cylinder, a sphere, or a torus.

  “Keep looking,” Sammann advised us.

  “The corners,” Cord said, “the—what-do-you-call-’em—”

  “Vertices,” I said. Those twenty triangular facets came together at twelve vertices; each vertex joined five triangles. These seemed to bulge outward a little. At first I’d mistaken this for blur. But on a closer look I convinced myself that each vertex was a little sphere. And this drew my eye to the edges. The twelve vertices were joined by a network of thirty straight edges. And those too had a rounded, bulging look to them—

  “There they are!” said Cord.

  I knew exactly what she meant. “The shock absorbers,” I said. For it was obvious, now: each of the thirty edges was a long slender shock absorber, just like the ones on the suspension of Cord’s fetch, except bigger. The frame of this ship was just a network of thirty shock absorbers that came together at a dozen spherical vertices. The entire thing was one big distributed shock absorption system.

  “There must be ball-and-socket joints in the corners, to make that work,” Cord said.

  “Yeah—otherwise the frame couldn’t flex,” I said. “But there’s a big part of this I’m not getting.”

  “What are the flats made of? The triangles?” Cord said.

  “Yeah. No point making a triangle out of things that can give, unless the stuff in the middle can give too—change its shape a little, when the shocks flex.” So we spent a while puzzling over the twenty flat, triangular surfaces that accounted for the ship’s surface area. These, I thought, looked a little funny. They looked rugged. Not smooth metal, but cobbled together.

  “I could almost swear it’s stucco.”

  “I was going to say concrete,” Cord said.

  “Think gravel,” suggested Sammann.

  “Okay,” Cord said, “gravel has some give to it where concrete doesn’t. But how’s it held together?”

  “There are a lot of little rocks floating around up there,” I said. “In a way, gravel’s the most plentiful solid thing you can obtain in space.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “But that doesn’t answer your question,” I admitted. “Who knows? Maybe they have woven some kind of mesh to hold them in place.”

  “Erosion control,” Cord said, nodding.

  “What?”

  “You see it on the banks of rivers, where they’re trying to stop erosion. They’ll throw a bunch of rocks into a cube of wire mesh, then stack the cubes and wire ’em together.”

  “It’s a good analogy,” I said. “You need erosion control in space too.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “Micrometeoroids and cosmic rays are always coming in from all directions. If you can surround your ship with a shell of cheap material—aka, gravel—you’ve cut down quite a bit on the problem.”

  “Hey, wait a sec,” she said, “this one looks different.” She was pointing to one face that had a circle inscribed in it. We hadn’t noticed it at first, because it was around to one side, foreshortened, harder to make out. The circle was clearly made of different stuff: I had the feeling it was hard, smooth, and stiff.

  “Not only that,” I pointed out, “but—”

  She’d caught it too: “No shocks around this one.” The three edges outlining this face were sharp and simple.

  “I’ve got it!” I said. “That one is the pusher plate.”

  “The what?”

  I explained about the atomic bombs and the pusher plate. She accepted this much more readily than any of us had. The ship that Lio had shown us in the book had been a stack: pusher plate, shocks, crew quarters. This one was an envelope: the outer shell was one large distributed shock absorber, as well as a shield. And, I was beginning to realize, a shroud. A veil to hide whatever was suspended in the middle.

  Once we’d identified the pusher plate—the stern of the ship—our eyes were naturally drawn to the face on the opposite, or forward end: its prow. This was hidden from view. But one of the adjoining shock absorbers was visible. And something was written on it. Printed there neatly was a line of glyphs that had to be an inscription in some language. Some of the glyphs, like circles and simple combinations of strokes, could easily be mistaken for characters in our Bazian alphabet. But others belonged to no alphabet that I had ever seen.

  And yet they were so close to our letters that this alphabet seemed almost like a sib of ours. Some of them were Bazian letters turned upside-down or reflected in a mirror.

  I flung the blanket off.

&
nbsp; “Hey!” Cord complained, and closed her eyes.

  Fraa Jad turned around and looked me in the face. He seemed ever so slightly amused.

  “These people”—I did not call them aliens—“are related to us.”

  “We have started referring to them as the Cousins,” announced Fraa Criscan, the Hundreder sitting next to Fraa Jad.

  “What could possibly explain that!?” I demanded—as if they could possibly know such a thing.

  “These others have been speculating about it,” Fraa Jad said. “Wasting their time—as it is just a hypothesis.”

  “How big is this thing—has anyone tried to estimate its dimensions?” I asked.

  “I know that from the settings of the telescope and the tablet,” Sammann said “It is about three miles in diameter.”

  “Let me spare you having to work it out in your head,” said Fraa Criscan, watching my face, mildly amused. “If you want to generate pseudogravity by spinning part of the ship—”

  “Like those old doughnut-shaped space stations in spec-fic speelies?” I asked.

  Criscan looked blank. “I’ve never seen a speely, but yes, I think we are talking about the same thing.”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay. If you are playing that game, and you want to generate the same level of gravity we have here on Arbre—and if there is such a thing hidden inside of this icosahedron—”

  “Which is kind of what I was imagining,” I allowed.

  “Say it’s two miles across. The radius is one mile. It would have to spin about once every eighty seconds to provide Arbre gravity.”

  “Seems reasonable. Doable,” I said.

  “What are you talking about?” Cord asked.

  “Could you live on a merry-go-round that spun once every minute and a half?”

  She shrugged. “Sure.”

  “Are you talking about where the Cousins came from?” shouted Rosk over his shoulder. He couldn’t understand Orth but he could pick out some words and he could read our tones of voice.

  “We’re debating whether it is productive to have any such discussion at all,” I said, but that was a little too complicated, shouted from the back of the fetch over road noise.