Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  “In books and speelies, sometimes you see a fictional universe where an ancient race seeded a bunch of different star systems with colonies that lost touch with each other afterwards,” Rosk volunteered.

  The other avout in the vehicle looked as if they were biting their tongues.

  “The problem is, Rosk, we have a fossil record—”

  “That goes back billions of years, yeah, that is a problem with that idea,” Rosk admitted. From which I guessed that others had already torn this idea limb from limb before his eyes, but that Rosk liked it too much to let go of it—he’d never been taught Diax’s Rake.

  Cord had put the blanket back over her head but she said, “Another idea that we were talking about earlier was, you know, the whole concept of parallel universes. Then Fraa Jad pointed out that this ship is quite clearly in this universe.”

  “What a killjoy,” I remarked—in Fluccish, obviously.

  “Yeah,” she said. “It is a real drag hanging around with you people. So logical. Speaking of which—did you notice the geometry proof?”

  “What?”

  “They couldn’t stop talking about it, earlier.”

  I ducked back under the blanket with her. She knew how to pan and zoom the image. She magnified one of the faces, then dragged it around until the screen was filled with something that looked like this, though a lot streakier and blurrier:

  “That’s certainly a weird thing to put on your ship,” I said. I zoomed back out for a moment because I wanted to get a sense of where this diagram was located. It was centered on one of the icosahedron’s faces, adjoining, and just aft of, the one that we had identified as the bow. If the ship’s envelope was made of gravel, held in some kind of matrix, then this diagram had been built into this face as a sort of mosaic, by picking out darker pieces of gravel and setting them carefully into place. They’d put a lot of work into it.

  “It’s their emblem,” I said. Only speculating. But no one spoke out against the idea. I zoomed back in and spent a while examining the network of lines. It was obviously a proof—almost certainly of the Adrakhonic Theorem. The sort of problem that fids worked all the time as an exercise. Just as if I were sitting in a chalk hall, trying to get the answer quicker than Jesry, I began to break it down into triangles and to look for right angles and other features that I could use to anchor a proof. Any fid from the Halls of Orithena probably would have gotten it by now, but my plane geometry was a little rusty—

  Wait a minute! some part of my mind was saying.

  I poked my head out from under the blanket, careful this time not to blind Cord.

  “This is just plain creepy,” I said.

  “That’s the same word Lio used!” Rosk shouted back.

  “Why do you guys all think it’s creepy?” Cord wanted to know.

  “Please supply a definition of the oft-used Fluccish word creepy,” said Fraa Jad.

  I tried to explain it to the Thousander, but primitive emotional states were not what Orth was good at.

  “An intuition of the numenous,” Fraa Jad hazarded, “combined with a sense of dread.”

  “Dread is a strong word, but you are close.”

  Now I had to answer Cord’s question. I made a few false starts. Then I saw Sammann watching me and I got an idea. “Sammann here is an expert on information. Communication, to him, means transmitting a series of characters.”

  “Like the letters on this shock absorber?” Cord asked.

  “Exactly,” I said, “but since the Cousins use different letters, and have a different language, a message from them would look to us like something written in a secret code. We’d have to decipher it and translate it into our language. Instead of which the Cousins have decided here to—to—”

  “To bypass language,” Sammann said, impatient with my floundering.

  “Exactly! And instead they have gone directly to this picture.”

  “You think they put it there for us to see?” Cord asked.

  “Why else would you go to the trouble to put something on the outside of your ship? They wanted to mark themselves with something they knew we’d understand. And that is what’s creepy—the fact that they just knew in advance that we’d understand this.”

  “I don’t understand it,” Cord protested.

  “Yet. But you know what it is. And we could get you to understand it a lot faster than we could decipher an alien language. It looks to me as though Fraa Jad has already worked it out.” My eye had fallen on a leaf in his lap that bore a copy of the diagram, with some marks and notations that he had added as he had worked through the logic of the proof.

  Logic. Proof. The Cousins had these—had them in common with us.

  With us who lived in concents, that is.

  Avout with nukes!

  Roaming from star system to star system in a bomb-powered concent, making contact with their planet-bound brethren—

  “Snap out of it, Raz!” I said to myself.

  “Yes,” said Fraa Jad, who’d been watching my face, “please do.”

  “They came,” I said, “the Cousins did, and the Saecular Power picked them up on radar. Tracked them. Worried about them. Took pictures of them. Saw that.” I pointed to the proof on Fraa Jad’s lap. “Recognized it as an avout thing. Got worried. Figured out that the ship had been detected—somehow—by at least one fraa: Orolo.”

  “I told him about it,” Sammann said.

  “What?”

  Sammann looked uncomfortable. But I had gotten it all so badly wrong that he couldn’t contain himself—he had to straighten me out. “A communication reached us from the Saecular Power,” he said.

  “Us meaning the Ita?”

  “A third-order reticule.”

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind. We were told to go in secret—bypassing the hierarchs—to the concent’s foremost cosmographer, and tell him of this thing.”

  “And then what?”

  “There were no further instructions,” Sammann said.

  “So you chose Orolo.”

  Sammann shrugged. “I went to his vineyard one night while he was alone, cursing at his grapes, and told him this—told him I had stumbled across it while reviewing logs of routine mail-protocol traffic.”

  I didn’t understand a word of his Ita gibberish but I got the gist of it. “So, part of your orders from the Saecular Power were to make it seem that this was just you, acting on your own—”

  “So that they could later deny that they had anything to do with it,” Sammann said, “when it came time to crack down.”

  “I doubt that they were so premeditated,” Fraa Jad put in, using a mild tone of voice, as Sammann and I had become heated—conspiratorial. “Let us get out the Rake,” Jad went on. “The Saecular Power had radar, but not pictures. To get pictures they needed telescopes and people who knew how to use them. They did not want to involve the hierarchs. So they devised the strategy that Sammann has just explained to us. It was only a means of getting some pictures of the thing as quickly and quietly as possible. But when they did get the pictures, they saw this.” He rested the palm of his hand on the proof in his lap.

  “And then they realized that they’d made a big mistake,” I said, in a much calmer tone than before. “They had divulged the existence and nature of the Cousins to the last people in the world they’d want to know about them.”

  “Hence the closure of the starhenge and what happened to Orolo,” Sammann said, “and hence me in this fetch, as I have no idea what they’ll want to do to me.”

  I’d assumed until now that Sammann had obtained permission to go on this journey. This was my first hint that it was more complicated than that. I found it strange to hear an Ita voicing fear of getting in trouble, since usually it was we who worried about their sneaky tricks—such as the one that had ensnared Orolo. But then my point of view snapped around and I saw it his way. Precisely because people believed the things they did about the Ita, no one was likely to believe Sammann’s stor
y or stand up for him if all of these doings broke out into the open.

  “So you made this copy of the tablet and kept it so that you would have—”

  “Something,” he said, “that I could leverage.”

  “And you showed yourself in Clesthyra’s Eye. Announcing, in a deniable way, that you knew something—that you had information.”

  “Advertising,” Sammann said, and the shape of his face changed, whiskers shifting on whiskers—his way of hinting at a smile.

  “Well, it worked,” I said, “and here you are, on the road to nowhere, being driven around by a bunch of Deolaters.”

  Cord got fed up with hearing Orth and moved up to the front of the fetch to sit with Rosk. I felt sorry—but some things were nearly impossible to talk about in Fluccish.

  I was dying to ask Fraa Jad about the nuclear waste, but was reluctant to broach this topic with Sammann listening. So I drew my own copy of the proof on the Cousins’ ship and began working it. Before long I got bogged down. Cord and Rosk started playing some music on the fetch’s sound system, softly at first, more loudly when no one objected. This had to be the first time Fraa Jad had ever heard popular music. I cringed so hard I thought I’d get internal injuries. But the Thousander accepted it as calmly as he had the Dynaglide lubri-strip. I gave up trying to work the proof, and just looked out the window and listened to the music. In spite of all of my prejudices against extramuros culture, I kept being surprised by moments of beauty in these songs. Most of them were forgettable but one in ten sheltered some turn or inflection that proved that the person who had made it had achieved some kind of upsight—had, for a moment, got it. I wondered if this was a representative sampling, or if Cord was just unusually good at finding songs with beauty in them and loading only those onto her jeejah.

  The music, the heat of the afternoon, the jouncing of the fetch, my lack of sleep, and shock at leaving the concent—with all of these affecting me at once, it was no wonder I couldn’t work a proof. But as the day grew old and the sun came in more and more horizontally, as the dying towns and ruined irrigation systems came less and less frequently and the landscape was purified into high desert, spattered with stony ruins, I started thinking that something else was working on me.

  I was used to Orolo being dead. Not literally dead and buried, of course, but dead to me. That was what Anathem did: killed an avout without damaging the body. Now, with only a few hours to get used to the idea, I was about to see Orolo again. At any moment, for all I knew, we might spy him hiking up one of these lonely crags to get ready for a night’s observations. Or perhaps his emaciated corpse was waiting for us under a cairn thrown up by slines descended from those who’d eaten Saunt Bly’s liver. Either way, it was impossible for me to think of anything else when I might be confronted by such a thing at any moment.

  Cord’s face was shining on me. She reached for a control and turned down the music, then repeated something. I had gone into a sort of trance, which I shattered by moving.

  “Ferman’s on the jeejah,” she explained. “He wants to stop. Pee and parley.”

  Both sounded good to me. We pulled off at a wide place in the road along a curving grade, a third of the way into a descent that would, over the next half-hour, take us into a flat-bottomed valley that connected to the horizon. This was no valley of the wet and verdant type, but a failure in the land where withered creeks went to die and flash floods spent their rage on a supine waste. Spires and palisades of brown basalt hurled shadows much longer than they were tall. Two solitary mountains rose up perhaps twenty or thirty miles away. We gathered around the cartabla and convinced ourselves that those were two of the three candidates we’d chosen earlier. As for the third—well, it appeared that we had just driven around it and were now scouring its lower slopes.

  Ferman wanted to talk to me in my capacity as leader. I shook off the last wisps of the near-coma I had sunk into, and drew myself up straight.

  “I know you guys don’t believe in God,” he began, “but considering the way you live, well, I thought you might feel more at home staying with—”

  “Bazian monks?” I hazarded.

  “Yes, exactly.” He was a little taken aback that I knew this. It was only a lucky guess. When Sammann had mentioned earlier that Ferman was talking to a “Bazian installation,” I had imagined a cathedral or at any rate something opulent. But that was before I’d seen the landscape.

  “A monastery,” I said, “is on one of those mountains?”

  “The closer of the two. You can see it about halfway up, on the northern flank.”

  With some hints from Ferman I was able to see a break in the mountain’s slope, a sort of natural terrace sheltered under a crescent of dark green: trees, I assumed.

  “I’ve been there for retreats,” Ferman remarked. “Used to send my kids there every summer.”

  The concept of a retreat didn’t make sense to me until I realized that it was how I lived my entire life.

  Ferman misinterpreted my silence. He turned to face me and held up his hands, palms out. “Now, if you’re not comfortable, let me tell you we have enough water and food and bedrolls and so on that we can camp anywhere we like. But I was thinking—”

  “It’s reasonable,” I said, “if they’ll accept women.”

  “The monks have their own cloister, separate from the camp. But girls stay at the camp all the time—they have women on the staff.”

  It had been a long day. The sun was going down. I was tired. I shrugged. “If nothing else,” I said, “it might make for a good story or two, for us to tell when we get to Saunt Tredegarh.”

  Lio and Arsibalt had been hovering. They pounced on me as soon as Ferman Beller started to walk away. They both had the somewhat tense and frayed look of people who’d just spent several hours cooped up with Barb. “Fraa Erasmas,” Arsibalt began, “let’s be realistic. Look at this landscape! There’s no way anyone could live here on his own. How would one obtain food, water, medical care?”

  “Trees are growing on one place on that mountain,” I said. “That probably means that there is fresh water. People like Ferman send their kids here for summer camp—how bad can it be?”

  “It’s an oasis!” Lio said, having fun whipping out this exotic word.

  “Yeah. And if the nearer butte has an oasis large enough for a monastery and a summer camp, why couldn’t the farther one have a place where Ferals like Bly, Estemard, and Orolo could live in the shade and drink spring water?”

  “That doesn’t solve the problem of getting food,” Arsibalt pointed out.

  “Well, it’s an improvement on the picture that I’ve been carrying around in my head,” I said. I didn’t have to explain this to the others because they’d had it in their heads too: desperate men living on the top of a mountain, eating lichens.

  “There must be a way,” I continued, “the Bazian monks do it.”

  “They are a larger community, and they are supported by alms,” Arsibalt said.

  “Orolo told me that Estemard had been sending him letters from Bly’s Butte for years. And Saunt Bly managed to live there for a while—”

  “Only because slines worshipped him.” Lio pointed out.

  “Well, maybe we’ll find a bunch of slines bowing down to Orolo then. I don’t know how it works. Maybe there’s a tourist industry.”

  “Are you joking?” Arsibalt asked.

  “Look at this wide spot in the road where we are stopped,” I said.

  “What of it?”

  “Why do you suppose it’s here?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea, I’m not a praxic,” Arsibalt said.

  “So that vehicles can pass each other more easily?” Lio guessed.

  I held out my arm, drawing their attention to the view. “It’s here because of that.”

  “What? Because it’s beautiful?”

  “Yeah.” And then I turned away from Arsibalt and looked at Lio, who started to walk away. I fell in alongside him. Arsibalt stayed
behind to examine the view, as if he could discover some flaw in my logic by staring at it long enough.

  “Did you get a chance to look at the icosahedron?” Lio asked me. “Yeah. And I saw the proof—the geometry.”

  “You think these people are like us. That they will be sympathetic to our point of view as followers of Our Mother Hylaea,” he said, trying these phrases on me for size.

  I was already defensive—sensing a flank maneuver. “Well, I think that they are clearly trying to get at something by making the Adrakhonic Theorem into their emblem…”

  “The ship is heavily armed,” he said.

  “Obviously!”

  He was already shaking his head. “I’m not talking about the propulsion charges. They’d be almost useless as weapons. I’m talking about other things on that ship—things that become obvious when you look for them.”

  “I didn’t see anything that looked remotely like a weapon.”

  “You can hide a lot of equipment on a mile-long shock absorber,” he pointed out, “and who knows what’s concealed under all that gravel.”

  “Can you give me an example?”

  “The faces have regularly spaced features on them. I think that they are antennas.”

  “So? Obviously they’re going to have antennas.”

  “They are phased arrays,” he said. “Military stuff. Just what you’d want to aim an X-ray laser, or a high-velocity impactor. I’ll need to consult books to know more. Also, I don’t like the planets lined up on the nose.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s a row of four disks painted on a forward shock. I think that they are depictions of planets. Like on a military aerocraft of the Praxic Age.”

  It took me a few moments to sort out the reference. “Wait a minute, you think that they are kills?”

  Lio shrugged.

  “Well, now, hold on a second!” I said. “Couldn’t it be that it’s something more benign? Maybe those are the home planets of the Cousins.”

  “I just think that everyone is too eager to look for happy, comforting interpretations—”