Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  “And your role as a Warden Fendant-in-the-making is to be way more vigilant than that,” I said, “and you’re doing a great job.”

  “Thanks.”

  We walked along silently for a little while, strolling up and down the length of this wide place, occasionally passing others who were taking the opportunity to get a little bit of exercise. We happened upon Fraa Jad, who was walking alone. I decided that now was the moment.

  “Fraa Lio,” I said, “Fraa Jad has informed me that the Millenarian math at Saunt Edhar is one of three places where the Saecular Power put all of its nuclear waste around the time of the Reconstitution. The other two are Rambalf and Tredegarh. Both of them were illuminated last night by a laser from the Cousins’ ship.”

  Lio wasn’t as surprised by this as I’d hoped. “Among Fendant types there is a suspicion that the Three Inviolates were allowed to remain unsacked for a reason. One hypothesis is that they are dumps for Everything Killers and other dangerous leftovers of the Praxic Age.”

  “Please. You speak of my home. Don’t call it a dump,” Fraa Jad said. But he was amused—not offended. He was being—if I could say this of a Thousander—playful.

  “Have you seen the stuff?” Lio asked.

  “Oh yes. It is in cylinders, in a cavern in the rock. We see it every day.”

  “Why?”

  “Various reasons. For example, my avocation is thatcher.”

  “I don’t recognize the word,” I said.

  “It is an ancient profession: one who makes roofs out of grass.”

  “What possible application could that have in a nuclear waste d—repository?”

  “Condensation forms on the ceiling of the cavern and drips onto the tops of the cylinders. Over thousands of years it could corrode them—or, just as bad, form stalagmites whose weight would crush and rupture the containers. We have always maintained thatched roofs atop the cylinders to prevent this from happening.”

  This was all so weird that I couldn’t think of anything to do other than to continue making polite chatter. “Oh, I see. Where do you get the grass? You don’t have much room to grow grass up there, do you?”

  “We don’t need much. A properly made thatching lasts for a long time. I have yet to replace all of those that were put in place by my fid, Suur Avradale, a century ago.”

  Lio and I both walked on for a few paces before this hit us; then we exchanged a look, and wordlessly agreed not to say anything.

  “He was just having us on,” I said, the next time Lio and I could speak privately, which was at the retreat center, as we were dropping our bags in the cell we were to share. “He was getting back at us for calling his math a dump.”

  Lio said nothing.

  “Lio! He’s not that old!”

  Lio put his bag down, stood up straighter than I could, and rotated his shoulders down and back, which was a way of recovering his equilibrium. As if he could defeat opponents just through superior posture. “Let’s not worry about how old he is.”

  “You think he is that old.”

  “I said, let’s not worry about it.”

  “I don’t think we have to worry about it. But it would be interesting to know.”

  “Interesting?” Lio did the shoulder thing again. “Look. We’re both talking bulshytt, would you agree?”

  “Yeah, I agree,” I said immediately.

  “Enough of this. We have to talk straight—and then we have to shut up, if we don’t want to get burned at the stake.”

  “Okay. You see this from a Fendant point of view. I take your point.”

  “Good. So we both know what we’re really talking about now.”

  “That you can’t live that long without repairing the sequences in the nuclei of your cells,” I said.

  “Especially if you work around radiation.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.” I pondered it for a moment, replaying the earlier conversation with Jad. “How could he have possibly made such a slip? He must know how dangerous it is even to hint that he is—er—the sort of person who can do things like repairing his own cells.”

  “Are you kidding? It wasn’t a slip. It was deliberate, Raz.”

  “He was letting us know—”

  “He was entrusting us with his life,” Lio said. “Haven’t you noticed how he was sizing everyone up today? He chose us, my fraa.”

  “Wow! If that’s really true, I’m honored.”

  “Well, enjoy being honored while you can,” Lio said, “because that kind of honor doesn’t come without obligations.”

  “What kind of obligations are you thinking of?”

  “How should I know? I’m just saying that he was Evoked for a reason. He’s expected to do something. He’s starting to develop a strategy. And we’re part of that strategy now. Soldiers. Pawns.”

  This shut me up for a little while; I could hardly think straight.

  Then I remembered something that somehow made it easier.

  “We were already pawns anyway,” I said.

  “Yeah. And given the choice, I’d rather be a pawn of someone I can see,” Lio said. And then he smiled the old Lio smile for the first time since last night. He had been more serious than I’d ever seen him. But the sight of those kills—if that was what they were—lined up on that ship had given him a lot to be serious about.

  We avout liked to tell ourselves that we lived in a humble and austere manner, by contrast with Bazian prelates who strutted around in silk robes, enveloped in clouds of incense. But at least our buildings were made out of stone and didn’t need a lot of upkeep. This place was all wooden: higher up the slope, a little ark and a ring of barracks that formed a sort of cloister, centered on a spring. Down closer to the road, two rows of cells with bunk beds and a large building with a dining hall and a few meeting rooms. The buildings were well taken care of, but it was obvious that they were in continual decay and that, if the people were to leave, the place would be a pile of kindling in a few decades.

  We did not get to see how the monks lived. The cells where we stayed were clean but covered with graffiti scratched into the walls and bunks by the kids who came here by the coach-load during the summer. It was just dumb luck that no kids were there when we arrived; one group had departed a couple of days earlier, and another was expected soon. Of the half-dozen young adults who staffed the place, four had gone back to town during the break. The remaining two, and the Bazian priest who was in charge of the retreat center, had prepared a simple meal for us. After we’d deposited our bags in our cells and spent a few minutes cleaning up in the communal bathrooms, we convened in the dining hall and sat down at rows of folding tables much like the ones we used at Apert. The place smelled of art supplies.

  The monks, we were told, numbered forty-three, which seemed like a small figure to us avout for whom a chapter was a hundred strong. Four of them came down to dine with us. It wasn’t clear whether they had special status, like hierarchs, or were simply the only ones of the forty-three who had any curiosity about us. All of them were greybeards, and all wanted to meet Fraa Jad. Bazian Orthodox clerical Orth was about seventy percent the same as what we spoke.

  After the exchange that Lio and I just had, you might think we’d have wanted to sit next to Fraa Jad, but in fact we had the opposite reaction and ended up sitting as far away from him as we could—as if we were secret agents in a speely, making a big point of preserving our cover, playing it cool. At the last minute, Arsibalt hustled in with several of the Hundreders; they’d been running a calca in one of the cabins. He had a wild look about him, desperate to talk. He had not been able to examine the photomnenomic tablet until late in the day. Now he’d seen the geometry proof blazoned on the Cousins’ ship, and he was about to explode. I felt sorry for him when he came into the dining hall and found himself forced to choose between sitting with me and Lio, or with Fraa Jad and the Bazian monks. Ferman Beller, noting his indecision, stood up and beckoned him over. Arsibalt couldn’t decline the invitation with
out giving offense, so he went and sat with Ferman.

  We always opened our meals by invoking the memory of Saunt Cartas. The gist of it was that our minds might be nourished by all manner of ideas originating from thinkers dating all the way back to Cnoüs, but for the physical nourishment of our bodies we relied upon one another, joined in the Discipline that we owed to Cartas. Deolaters, on the other hand, all had different pre-meal rituals. Bazian Orthodoxy was a post-agrarian religion in which literal sacrifice had been replaced by symbolic; they opened their meals with a re-enactment in effigy of that, then praised their God for a while, then asked Him for goods and services. The priest who ran the retreat center launched into it out of habit, but got unnerved in the middle when he noticed that none of the avout were bowing their heads, just gazing at him curiously. I didn’t think he was all that troubled by our not believing what he believed—he must have been used to that. He was more embarrassed that he’d committed a faux pas. So, when he was finished, he implored us to say whatever sort of blessing or invocation might be traditional in the math. As mentioned we were strangely lacking in sopranos and altos, but we were able to put together enough tenors, baritones, and basses to sing a very ancient and simple Invocation of Cartas. Fraa Jad handled the drone, and I could swear he made the silverware buzz on the tables.

  The four monks seemed to enjoy this very much, and when we’d finished they stood up and did an equally ancient-sounding prayer. It must have dated back to the early centuries of their monastic age, just after the Fall of Baz, because their Old Orth was indistinguishable from ours, and it had obviously been composed in a time before the music of the maths and of the monasteries had diverged. If you didn’t listen too carefully to the words, you could easily mistake this piece for one of ours.

  The conversation during the meal had to be superficial compared to the events of the last twenty-four hours, given that we had to talk in Fluccish and couldn’t mention the ship in earshot of our hosts. I became frustrated, then bored, then drowsy, and ate mostly in silence. Cord and Rosk talked to each other. They weren’t religious, and I could tell they felt awkward here. One of the young women on the staff made lavish efforts to make them feel welcome, which mostly backfired. Sammann was absorbed in his jeejah, which he had somehow patched into the retreat center’s communications system. Barb had found a list of the camp rules and was memorizing it. Our three Hundreders sat in a cluster and talked amongst themselves; they could not speak Fluccish and didn’t have the Thousander glamor that had made Fraa Jad the center of attention with the Bazian monks. I noticed that Arsibalt was deep in conversation with Ferman, and that Cord and Rosk had shifted closer to them, so I wandered over to see what they were talking about. It seemed that Ferman had been thinking about the Sconics, and wanted to know more. Arsibalt, for lack of any other way to pass the time, had launched into a calca called “The Fly, the Bat, and the Worm,” which was a traditional way of explaining the Sconic theory of time and space to fids. “Look at that fly crawling around on the table,” Arsibalt said. “No, don’t shoo it away. Just look at it. The size of its eyes.”

  Ferman Beller gave it a quick glance and then returned his eyes to his dinner. “Yeah, half of its body seems to be eyes.”

  “Thousands of separate eyes, actually. It doesn’t seem as though it could possibly work.” Arsibalt reached back behind himself and waved his hand around, nearly hitting me in the face. “Yet if I wave my hand back here, far away, it doesn’t care—knows there is no threat. But if I bring my hand closer…”

  Arsibalt brought his hand forward. The fly took off.

  “…somehow its microscopic brain takes signals from thousands of separate, primitive eyes and integrates them into a correct picture, not merely of space, but of spacetime. It knows where my hand is. Knows that if my hand keeps moving thus, it’ll soon squash it—so it had better change its position.”

  “You think the Cousins have eyes like that?” Beller asked.

  Arsibalt dodged sideways: “Maybe they’re like bats instead. A bat would have detected my hand by listening for echoes.”

  Beller shrugged. “All right. Maybe the Cousins squeak like bats.”

  “On the other hand, when I shift my body to swat the fly, it creates a pattern of vibrations in the table that a creature—even a deaf and blind one, such as a worm—might feel…”

  “Where is this going?” Beller asked.

  “Let’s do a thought experiment,” Arsibalt said. “Consider a Protan fly. By that, I mean the pure, ideal form of a fly.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “All eyes. No other sense organs.”

  “All right, I’m considering it,” Beller said, trying to be good-humored.

  “Now, a Protan bat.”

  “All ears?”

  “Yes. Now a Protan worm.”

  “Meaning all touch?”

  “Yes. No eyes, ears, or nose—just skin.”

  “Are we going to do all five senses?”

  “It would start to become boring, so let’s stop with three,” Arsibalt said. “We place the fly, the bat, and the worm in a room with some object—let’s say a candle. The fly sees its light. The bat squeals at it, and hears its echoes. The worm feels its warmth, and can crawl over it to feel its shape.”

  “It sounds like the old parable of the six blind men and the—”

  “No!” said Arsibalt. “This is completely different. Almost the opposite. The six blind men all have the same sensory equipment—”

  Beller nodded, seeing his mistake. “Yeah, but the fly, the bat, and the worm have different ones.”

  “And the six blind men disagree about what it is they are groping—”

  “But the fly, the bat, and the worm agree?” Beller asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “You sound skeptical. Rightly so. But they are all sensing the same object, are they not?”

  “Sure,” Beller said, “but when you say that they agree with each other, I don’t know what that means.”

  “It’s a fascinating question, so let’s explore it. Let’s change the rules a little,” said Arsibalt, “just to set the stakes a little higher, and make it so that they have to agree. The thing in the middle of the room isn’t a candle. Now, it’s a trap.”

  “A trap!?” Beller laughed.

  Arsibalt got a proud look.

  “What’s the point of that?” Beller asked.

  “Now there’s a threat, you see. They have to figure out what it is or they’ll be caught.”

  “Why not a hand coming down to swat them?”

  “I thought of that,” Arsibalt admitted, “but we have to make allowances for the poor worm, who senses things very slowly compared to the other two.”

  “Well,” Beller said, “I expect they’re all going to be caught in the trap sooner or later.”

  “They are very intelligent,” Arsibalt put in.

  “Still—”

  “All right then, it is a huge cavern swarming with millions of flies, bats, and worms. Thousands of traps are scattered about the place. When a trap catches or kills a victim, the tragedy is witnessed by many others, who learn from it.”

  Beller considered it for a while as he served himself some more vegetables. After a while, he said, “Well, I expect that where you’re going with it is that once enough time has gone by, and enough of these critters have been caught, the flies will learn what a trap looks like, the bats what it sounds like, the worms what it feels like.”

  “The traps are being planted by exterminators who are intent on killing everything. They keep disguising them, and coming up with new designs.”

  “All right,” Beller said, “then the flies, bats, and worms have to get clever enough to detect traps that are disguised.”

  “A trap could look like anything,” Arsibalt said, “so they must learn to look at any object in their environment and to puzzle out whether or not it could possibly function as a trap.”

  “Okay.”

  “Now, some of the tr
aps are suspended from strings. The worms can’t reach them or feel their vibrations.”

  “Too bad for the worms!” Beller said.

  “The flies can’t see anything at night.”

  “Poor flies.”

  “Some parts of the cavern are so noisy that the bats can’t hear a thing.”

  “Well, it sounds as though the flies, the bats, and the worms had better learn to cooperate with one another,” Beller said.

  “How?” This was the sound of Arsibalt’s trap closing on his leg.

  “Uh, by communicating, I guess.”

  “Oh. And what exactly does the worm say to the bat?”

  “What does all of this have to do with the Cousins?” Beller asked.

  “It has everything to do with them!”

  “You think that the Cousins are hybrid fly-bat-worm creatures?”

  “No,” Arsibalt said, “I think that we are.”

  “AAARGH!” Beller cried, to laughter from everyone.

  Arsibalt threw up his hands as if to say how could I make this any clearer?

  “Please explain!” Beller said. “I’m not used to this, my brain’s getting tired.”

  “No, you explain. What does the worm say to the bat?”

  “The worm can’t even talk!”

  “This is a side issue. The worms learn over time that they can squirm around into different shapes that the bats and flies can recognize.”

  “Fine. And—let me see—the flies could fly down and crawl around on the worms’ backs and give them signals that way. Et cetera. So, I guess that each type of critter could invent signals that the other two could detect: worm-bat, bat-fly, and so on.”

  “Agreed. Now. What do they say to each other?”

  “Well, hold on now, Arsibalt. You’re skipping over a bunch of stuff! It’s one thing to say a worm can squirm into a shape like C or S that could be recognized by a fly looking down. But that’s an alphabet. Not a language.”

  Arsibalt shrugged. “But languages develop over time. Monkeys hooting at each other developed into some primitive speech: ‘there’s a snake under that rock’ and so forth.”