Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  We spiraled up and around to a point where we could look down into Samble and wave to our friends below. The service in the ark showed no sign of winding down. We had assumed that the vehicles would catch up with us soon into our hike. In other words, we were only doing this to get some exercise—not as a way of getting to the top. But now it seemed we might get there before our vehicles did. For some reason this aroused our competitive instincts and made us hike faster. We found a shortcut that had been used by other hikers, and cut off one whole circuit of the mountain by scrambling straight up the slope for a couple of hundred feet.

  “Did you know Fraa Paphlagon?” I asked Criscan when we stopped at the top of the shortcut to drink water and marvel at our progress. The view was worth a few minutes.

  “I was his fid,” Criscan said. “You were Orolo’s?”

  I nodded. “Are you aware that Orolo was a fid of Paphlagon before Paphlagon came to you through the labyrinth?”

  Fraa Criscan said nothing. For Paphlagon to have mentioned Orolo—or anything about his former life among the Tenners—to Criscan would have been a violation of the Discipline. But it was the sort of thing that could easily leak out when talking about one’s work. I went on, “Paphlagon and another Tenner named Estemard worked together and raised Orolo. They left at the same time: Paphlagon via the labyrinth and Estemard via the Day Gate. Estemard came here.”

  Criscan asked, “What was Orolo’s reputation? Before his Anathem, I mean.”

  “He was our best,” I said—surprised by the question. “Why? What was Paphlagon’s reputation?”

  “Similar.”

  “But—?” Because I could tell that there was a “but” coming.

  “His avocation was a bit strange. Instead of doing something with his hands like most people, he made a hobby of studying—”

  “We know,” I said. “The polycosm. And/or the Hylaean Theoric World.”

  “You looked at his writings,” Criscan said.

  “Twenty-year-old writings,” I reminded him. “We have no idea what he’s been up to recently.”

  Criscan said nothing for a few moments, then shrugged. “It seems highly relevant to the Convox, so I guess it’s okay for me to talk to you about it.”

  “We won’t tell on you,” Lio promised him.

  Criscan didn’t catch the humor. “Have you ever noticed that when people are talking about the idea of the Hylaean Theoric World, they always end up drawing the same diagram?”

  “Yeah—now that you mention it,” I said.

  “Two circles or boxes,” Lio said. “An arrow from one to the other.”

  “One circle or box represents the Hylaean Theoric World,” I said. “The arrow starts there and points to the other one, which represents this world.”

  “This cosmos,” Criscan corrected me. “Or causal domain, if you will. And the arrow represents—?”

  “A flow of information,” Lio said. “Knowledge of triangles pouring into our brains.”

  “Cause-and-effect relationship,” was my guess. I was recalling Orolo’s talk of Causal Domain Shear.

  “Those two amount to the same thing,” Criscan reminded us. “That kind of diagram is an assertion that information about theorical forms can get to our cosmos from the HTW, and cause measurable effects here.”

  “Hold on, measurable? What kind of measurable are you talking about?” Lio asked. “You can’t weigh a triangle. You can’t pound in a nail with the Adrakhonic Theorem.”

  “But you can think about those things,” Criscan said, “and thinking is a physical process that goes on in your nerve tissue.”

  “You can stick probes into the brain and measure it,” I said.

  “That’s right,” Criscan said, “and the whole premise of Protism is that those brain probes would show different results if there weren’t this flow of information coming in from the Hylaean Theoric World.”

  “I guess that’s so,” Lio admitted, “but it sounds pretty sketchy when you put it that way.”

  “Never mind about that for now,” Criscan said. We were on a steep part of the road, breathing hard and sweating as the sun shone down on us, and he didn’t want to expend much energy on it. “Let’s get back to that two-box diagram. Paphlagon was part of a tradition, going back to one Suur Uthentine at Saunt Baritoe’s in the fourteenth century A.R., that asks ‘why only two?’ Supposedly it all started when Uthentine walked into a chalk hall and happened to see the conventional two-box diagram where it had been drawn up on a slate by one Fraa Erasmas.”

  Lio turned and looked at me.

  “Yes,” I said, “my namesake.”

  Criscan went on, “Uthentine said to Erasmas, ‘I see you are teaching your fids about Directed Acyclic Graphs; when are you going to move on to ones that are a little more interesting?’ To which Erasmas said, ‘I beg your pardon, but that’s no DAG, it is something else entirely.’ This affronted Suur Uthentine, who was a theor who had devoted her whole career to the study of such things. ‘I know a DAG when I see one,’ she said. Erasmas was exasperated, but on reflection, he decided it might be worth following up on his suur’s upsight. So Uthentine and Erasmas developed Complex Protism.”

  “As opposed to Simple?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Criscan said, “where Simple is the two-box kind. Complex can have any number of boxes and arrows, as long as the arrows never go round in a circle.”

  We had spiraled around to the shady side of the butte, and come to a stretch of road that had been covered with silt during seasonal rains—perfect for drawing diagrams. While we rested and sipped water, Criscan went on to give us a calca* about Complex Protism. The gist of it was that our cosmos, far from being the one and only causal domain reached by information from a unique and solitary Hylaean Theoric World, might be only one node in a web of cosmi through which information percolated, always moving in the same direction, as lamp oil moves through a wick. Other cosmi—perhaps not so different from ours—might reside up-Wick from ours, and feed information to us. And yet others might be down-Wick from us, and we might be supplying information to them. All of which was pretty far out—but at least it helped me understand why Paphlagon had been Evoked.

  “Now I have a question for you Tenners,” Criscan said, as we set out again. “What was Estemard like?”

  “He walked out before we were Collected,” I said, “so we didn’t know him.”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” Criscan said, “we’ll know soon enough.”

  We walked on silently for a few steps before Lio—casting a wary glance to the top of the butte, not so far away now—said, “I’ve been looking into Estemard a little. Maybe I should tell you what I know before we barge into his house.”

  “Good for you. What did you learn?” I asked.

  “This might be one of those cases where someone walked out before he could be Thrown Back,” Lio said.

  “Really!? What was he doing?”

  “His avocation was tiles,” Lio said. “The really ornate tile work in the New Laundry was done by him.”

  “The geometric stuff,” I said.

  “Yes. But it seems he was using that as a sort of cover story to pursue an ancient geometry problem called the Teglon. It’s a tiling problem, and it dates all the way back to the Temple of Orithena.”

  “Isn’t that the problem that made a bunch of people crazy?” I asked.

  “Metekoranes was standing on the Decagon in front of the Temple of Orithena, contemplating the Teglon, when the ash rolled over him,” Criscan said.

  I said, “It’s the problem that Rabemekes was thinking about on the beach when the Bazian soldier ran him through with a spear.”

  Lio said, “Suur Charla of the Daughters of Hylaea thought she had the answer, scratched out on the dust of the road to Upper Colbon, when King Rooda’s army marched through on their way to getting massacred. She never recovered her sanity. People’s efforts to solve it have spun off entire sub-disciplines of theorics. And there are—have always be
en—some who paid more attention to it than was really good for them. The obsession gets passed down from one generation to the next.”

  “You’re talking of the Lineage,” Criscan said.

  “Yes,” Lio answered, with another nervous look up.

  “Which lineage do you mean?” I asked.

  “The Lineage, people call it,” Criscan said, “or sometimes the Old Lineage.”

  “Well…give me some help. What concents is it based at?”

  Criscan shook his head. “You’re assuming it’s like an Order. But this Lineage goes back farther than the Reconstitution—farther even than Saunt Cartas. Supposedly it was founded during the Peregrin period, by theors who had worked with Metekoranes.”

  “But who unlike him didn’t end up under three hundred feet of pumice,” Lio added.

  “That’s a whole different matter then,” I said. “If that’s really true, it’s not of the mathic world at all.”

  “That’s the problem,” Lio said, “the Lineage was around for centuries before the whole idea of maths, fraas, and suurs. So you wouldn’t expect it to operate according to any of the rules that we normally associate with our Orders.”

  “You are speaking of it in the present tense,” I pointed out.

  Criscan again looked uneasy, but he said nothing. Lio glanced up again, and slowed.

  “Where is this going? Why are you guys so nervous?” I asked.

  “Some came to suspect that Estemard was a member,” Lio said.

  “But Estemard was an Edharian,” I said.

  “That’s part of the problem,” Lio said.

  “Problem?” I asked.

  “Yes,” said Criscan, “for me and you, anyway.”

  “Why—because you and I are Edharians?”

  “Yes,” Criscan said, with a flick of the eyes toward Lio.

  “Well, Lio I trust with my life,” I told him. “So you can say anything in front of him that you might say to me as a fellow Edharian.”

  “All right,” Criscan said. “It doesn’t surprise me that you’ve never heard about this, since you have only been in the Order of Saunt Edhar for a few months, and you’re just a—er—”

  “Just a Tenner?” I said. “Go ahead, I’m not offended.” But I was, a little. Behind Criscan, Lio made a funny face that took the sting out of it.

  “Otherwise you might have heard rumors about this kind of thing. Remarks.”

  “To what effect?”

  “First of all, that Edharians in general are a little nutty—a little mystical.”

  “Of course I know some people like to say that,” I said.

  “All right,” Criscan said. “Well, then you know that one of the reasons people look askance at us Edharians is that it seems as though our devotion to the Hylaean Theoric World might take precedence over our loyalty to the Discipline and the principles of the Reconstitution.”

  “Okay,” I said, “I think that’s unfair but I can see how some people might harbor such notions.”

  Lio added, “Or pretend to harbor them when it gave them a weapon to wave in Edharians’ faces.”

  “Now,” Criscan said, “imagine that there was—or was thought to be—a Lineage of what amounted to ultra-Edharians.”

  “Are you telling me that people think there’s a connection between our Order and the Lineage?”

  Criscan nodded. “Some have gone so far as to lodge the accusation that the Edharians are a sham—a false front whose real purpose is to act as a host body for an infestation of Teglon-worshippers.”

  Given the number of contributions Edharians had made to theorics over the millennia, I didn’t have any trouble dismissing such a ludicrous claim, but one word caught my attention. “Worshippers,” I repeated.

  Criscan sighed. “The kinds of people who spread such rumors—” he began,

  “Are the same ones who think that our belief in the HTW is tantamount to religion,” I concluded. “And it suits their purposes to spread the idea that there is a secret cult at the heart of the Edharian order.”

  Criscan nodded.

  “Is there?” Lio asked.

  I’d have slugged him if I could have gotten away with it. Criscan didn’t know about Lio’s sense of humor and so he took it pretty badly.

  “What did Estemard actually do when he was pursuing this avocation?” I asked Lio. “Was he reading books? Trying to solve the Teglon? Lighting candles and reciting spells?”

  “Mostly reading books—very old ones,” Lio said. “Very old ones that had been left behind by others who in their day had likewise been under suspicion of belonging to the Lineage.”

  “Seems interesting but harmless,” I said.

  “Also, people noticed that he was unduly interested in the Millenarians. During auts, he would take notes while the Thousanders sang.”

  “How can anyone really follow the meaning of those chants without taking notes?”

  “And he went into the upper labyrinth a lot.”

  “Well,” I admitted, “that’s a bit odd…is it a part of the myth surrounding the Lineage that its members violate the Discipline—communicate across the boundaries of their maths?”

  “Yes,” Criscan said. “It fits in with the whole conspiracy-theory aspect. The slur on the Edharians in general is that they consider their work to be more profound, more important than anyone else’s—that the pursuit of the truths in the Hylaean Theoric World takes precedence over the Discipline. So, if their pursuit of the truth requires that they communicate with avout in other maths—or with extras—they have no compunctions about doing so.”

  This was sounding more and more ridiculous by the moment, and I was beginning to think it was one of those nutty Hundreder fads. But I said nothing, because I was thinking about Orolo talking to Sammann in the vineyard and making illicit observations.

  Lio snorted. “Extras? What kind of extras would care about a mystical, six-thousand-year-old theorics problem?”

  “The kind we’ve been hanging around with the last two days,” Criscan said.

  We had come to a complete stop. I stepped forward up the road. “Well, if everything you’re saying is true, we’re not doing ourselves any favors by being out here.”

  Criscan took my meaning right away but Lio looked puzzled. I went on, “Saunt Tredegarh is filling up with avout from all over the world. The hierarchs must be keeping track of who has arrived, from which concent. And we—a group of mostly Edharians from, of all things, the Concent of Saunt Edhar—are going to be late…”

  “Because we’ve been bending the rules—wandering among the Deolaters,” Lio said, beginning to get it.

  “…looking for a couple of wayward fraas who exactly fit the stereotype that Criscan’s been talking about.”

  Lio and I were at the summit a few minutes later. We had left Criscan huffing and puffing in our wake. All of the weird talk had made us nervous and we had practically run the rest of the way—not out of any practical need to hurry, simply to burn off energy.

  The top of Bly’s Butte looked as if it might have been a lovely place back in the days of Saunt Bly. It existed because there was a lens of hard rock that had resisted erosion and protected the softer stuff beneath it while everything for miles around had slowly washed down. There was enough room on top to construct a large house, say, the size of the one where Jesry’s family lived. A lot of different structures had been crammed onto it over the millennia. The bottom strata were masonry: stones or bricks mortared directly onto the butte’s hard summit. Later generations had poured synthetic stone directly atop those foundations to make small blockhouses, guard shacks, pillboxes, equipment enclosures, and foundations for aerials, dishes, and towers. These then had been modified: connections between them built, worn out, demolished or rusted away, replaced or buried under new work. The stone—synthetic and natural—was stained a deep ochre by the rust of all the metal structures that had been here at one time or another. For such a small area it was quite complicated—the sort of pla
ce children could have explored for hours. Lio and I were not so far out from being children that we couldn’t be tempted. But we had plenty else on our minds. So we looked for signs of habitation. The most conspicuous of these was a reflecting telescope that stood on a high plinth that had once supported an aerial tower. We went there first. The telescope looked in some ways like an art project that Cord or one of her friends might have made in a welding shop from scraps of steel. But looking into it we could see a hand-ground mirror, well over twelve inches in diameter, that looked perfect, and it was easy to figure out that it had a polar axis drive cobbled together from motors, gearboxes, and bearings scavenged from who knows where. From there it was easy to follow a trail of evidence across the platform and down an external stairway to a lower platform on the southeast exposure of the complex. This had been kitted out with a grill for cooking meat, weatherproof poly chairs and table, and a big umbrella. Children’s toys were stored with un-childlike neatness in a poly box, as if kids came up here sometimes, but not every day. A door led off this patio into a warren of small rooms—little more than equipment closets—that had been turned into a home. Whoever was living in this place, it wasn’t Orolo. Judging from phototypes on the walls, it was an older man with a somewhat younger wife and at least two generations of offspring. Ikons were almost as numerous as snapshots and so this was obviously a Deolater family. We gathered these impressions over the course of a few seconds before we realized we were trespassing on someone’s home. Then we felt stupid because this was such a typical avout mistake. We backed out so fast we almost knocked each other down.

  The patio was a smooth slab of synthetic stone. Given that Estemard was such a zealous tiler, it seemed odd that he had not improved it. But now we noticed a stair that led up to a ledge where he had fashioned a kiln out of burnt bricks. Around it was strewn the detritus of many years’ work: clay, molds, pots of glaze, and thousands of tiles and tile-shards in the same repertoire of simple geometric shapes as those that decorated the New Laundry at Edhar. Estemard hadn’t got round to tiling his patio yet because he hadn’t found the perfect configuration of tiles. He hadn’t solved the Teglon.