Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  “Clinically insane?” I asked Lio. “Or just well on his way?”

  Criscan came up a different way. When he found us, he mentioned that he’d seen another, smaller habitation. We followed him as he backtracked around the southern limb of the complex.

  We knew what it was instantly. All the earmarks of a pinprick math were plain to see. It was set off in a corner, reachable only by a long and somewhat challenging path, at the end of which stood a barrier—mostly symbolic, as it had been improvised recently from poly tarps and plywood—and a gate. Passing through the gate we found ourselves in a setting where we felt perfectly at home. It was another roofless slab. A broker of real estate might have called it a patio. We saw it as a miniature cloister. All vestiges of the Saecular had been carefully scrubbed away; all that remained was the ancient, stained stone, and a few necessaries, all hand-made: a table and chair sheltered beneath a canvas stretched over a frame of timbers lashed together with many turns of string. A rusty paintbucket stood in the corner, lid held down with a stone. Lio opened it, wrinkled his nose, and announced that he had found Orolo’s chamber pot. It was empty and dry. The ashes in the bottom of his brazier were cold. His water jug was empty and a wooden locker, which had once been used to store food, had been emptied of everything but seasonings, utensils, and matches.

  A beat-up wooden door led to Orolo’s cell, which for the most part was done up in similar style. The clock, however, was distinctly modern, with glowing digital readouts to a hundredth of a second. Bookshelves made of old stair treads and masonry blocks supported a few machine-printed books and hand-written leaves. One wall was covered by leaves: diagrams and notes Orolo had posted there using little dabs of tack. Another wall was covered by phototypes mostly showing various efforts that Orolo had made to capture images of the Cousins’ ship using (we assumed) the homemade telescope above. The typical image was little more than a fat white streak against a background of smaller white streaks: the tracks of stars. In one corner of this mosaic, though, Orolo had posted several unrelated phototypes that he had torn from publications or printed using a syndev. At a glance, these seemed to depict nothing more than a big hole in the ground: an open-pit mine, perhaps.

  The rest of the leaves formed an overlapping mosaic, with lines drawn from one to the next, diagramming a treelike system of connections. The uppermost leaf was labeled orithena. Near its top was written the name of Adrakhones. From it, one arrow descended vertically to the name of Diax. This was a dead end. But a second arrow, angling down and off to the side, pointed to the name of Metekoranes, and from it, the tree ramified downward to include names from many places and centuries.

  “Uh-oh,” Lio said.

  “I hate the looks of that,” I admitted.

  “It is Lineage stuff,” put in Criscan.

  The door opened, and there was violence. Not prolonged—it was finished in a second—and not severe. But it was definitely violence and it wrenched our minds so far out of the track we’d been following that there was no question of getting back to it any time soon.

  Simply, a man burst in through the cell’s door and Lio took him down. When it was finished, Lio was sitting on the man’s chest and examining, with utmost fascination, a projectile weapon that he had just extracted from a holster on the man’s hip. “Do you have any knives or anything like that?” Lio asked, and glanced at the door. More people were approaching. The foremost of these was Barb.

  “Get off me!” the man shouted. It took a moment for it to sink in that he was speaking in Orth. “Give me that back!” We noticed that he was pretty old, although when he’d come in the door, he’d moved with the vigor of a younger man.

  “Estemard carries a gun,” Barb announced. “It is a local tradition. They don’t consider it threatening.”

  “Well, I’m sure Estemard won’t feel threatened by my carrying this one, then,” Lio said. He rolled backward off Estemard and came up on his feet, gun in hand, pointed at the ceiling.

  “You have no business in here.” Estemard said, “And as for my gun, you’d better shoot me with it or hand it over.”

  Lio didn’t even consider handing it over.

  Now, through most of this I’d been so shocked, and then so confused, that I’d stood motionless. I had been afraid of doing anything for fear of doing the wrong thing. But the sight of my friends’ faces outside nudged me to act, since I didn’t wish to look tongue-tied or indecisive. “Since you have just asserted we have no business here,” I pointed out, “an assertion we disagree with, by the way, it would not be in our interests to supply you with weapons.”

  By this time, other members of our Peregrin group had crowded onto the patio. Fraa Jad came in, shouldered Estemard out of his way, took in the cell at a glance, and began examining the leaves and phototypes Orolo had put on the wall. This, much more than being knocked down by Lio or planed by me, made Estemard realize he was outmatched. He got smaller somehow, and looked away. Unlike the rest of us, he’d only had a few minutes to get used to being in the presence of a Thousander.

  “Lio, a lot of people carry sidearms out here.” It was Cord. “I can see why you got the wrong idea, but take my word for it, he was not going to draw down on you.” No one responded. “Come on, you bunch of sad sacks, it’s picnic time!”

  “Picnic?” I said.

  “After we are finished with our service,” Estemard said, “we have a cookout on the green, if the weather is good.” Cord’s intervention seemed to have cheered him up a little.

  I glanced out the door and caught the eye of Arsibalt, out on the patio. He raised his eyebrows. Yes. Estemard has become a Deolater.

  Back in the concent, we’d always pictured Ferals as long-haired wild men, but Estemard looked like a retired chemist out for a day hike.

  Estemard held me in a careful gaze. “You must be Erasmas,” he said. This seemed to settle something for him. He breathed deeply, shaking off the last vestiges of the shock he’d gone into when Lio had helped him to the floor. “Yes. All of you are invited to the picnic, if you promise not to assault people.” Seeing the objection percolating through my brain toward my face, he smiled and added, “People who haven’t assaulted you first, that is. And I doubt they will; they’re more tolerant of avout than you are of them.”

  “Where’s Orolo?”

  Fraa Jad, still planted with his back to us, currently viewing the phototypes of the open-pit mine, startled us all by unlimbering his subsonic voice: “Orolo has gone north.”

  Estemard was astonished; then the smile crept back onto his face as he figured out how the Thousander had figured this out. “Fraa Jad has it right.”

  “We shall attend the picnic,” Fraa Jad announced, pronouncing the Fluccish word with tweezers. “Lio, Erasmas, and I shall go down last, in the vehicle of Ganelial Crade.”

  This directive filtered out to the patio. People turned around and headed back toward the vehicles. Lio took the ammunition magazine out of the gun and handed them back separately to Estemard, who departed, reluctantly, with Criscan. As soon as they had passed out through the makeshift gate, Fraa Jad reached out and began plucking the leaves off the wall. Lio and I helped, and gave all that we’d harvested to Fraa Jad. He left most of the phototypes alone, but took the ones that depicted the big hole in the ground, and handed them to me.

  The Thousander went out to Orolo’s cloister and stuffed all of the leaves into the brazier. Then he reached into Orolo’s food-locker and took out the matches. “I infer from the label that this is a fire-making praxis,” he said.

  We showed him how to use matches. He set fire to Orolo’s leaves. We all stood around until they had turned to ash. Then Fraa Jad stirred the ashes with a stick.

  “Time for picnic,” he said.

  As we spiraled down the butte, jostling and rocking in the open back of Ganelial Crade’s fetch like so many bottles in a box, we were able to look down from time to time and see the picnic taking shape down on the village green of Samble. It appeared
that these people took their picnics as seriously as they did their religious services.

  Fraa Jad seemed to have other things on his mind, and said nothing until we were almost down to Samble. Then he pounded on the roof of the fetch’s cab and, in Orth, asked Crade if he wouldn’t mind waiting here for a few minutes. In really wild, barbarous-sounding Orth, Crade said that this would be fine.

  It had never crossed my mind that someone like Crade would know our language. But it made sense. The counter-Bazians distrusted priests and other middlemen. They believed everyone should read the scriptures themselves. Almost all read translations into Fluccish. But it wasn’t so farfetched to think that an especially fervent and isolated sect, such as the people of Samble, might learn Classical Orth so that they would no longer have to entrust their immortal souls to translators.

  Fraa Jad let me know I should get out. I vaulted from the back of the fetch and then helped him down, more out of respect than anything, since he didn’t seem to need much helping. We strolled about a hundred paces to a bend in the road where there was an especially nice view over the high desert to the mountains of the north, still patched with snow in places, and dappled by cloud-shadows. “We are just like Protas looking down over Ethras,” he remarked.

  I smiled but didn’t laugh. The work of Protas was viewed as embarrassingly naïve by many. It was rarely mentioned except to be funny or ironic. But to deprecate it so was a trend that had come and gone a hundred times, and there was no telling what Fraa Jad, whose math had been sealed off for 690 years, might think of it. The more I stood and looked at him and followed his gaze northward to the clouds and the shadows that they cast on the flanks of the mountains, the more glad I became that I hadn’t snickered.

  “What do you think Orolo saw, when he looked out thus?” Fraa Jad asked.

  “He was a great appreciator of beauty and loved to look at the mountains from the starhenge,” I said.

  “You think he saw beauty? That is a safe answer, since it is beautiful. But what was he thinking about? What connections did the beauty enable him to perceive?”

  “I couldn’t possibly answer that.”

  “Don’t answer it. Ask it.”

  “More concretely, what do you want me to do?”

  “Go north,” he said. “Follow and find Orolo.”

  “Tredegarh is south and east.”

  “Tredegarh,” he repeated, as if waking from a dream of it. “That is where I and the others shall go after the picnic.”

  “I have bent the rules quite a bit by coming here,” I said. “We’ve lost a day—”

  “A day. A day!” Fraa Jad, the Thousander, thought it was pretty funny that I should care about a day.

  “Chasing Orolo around could take months,” I said. “For being so late, I could be Thrown Back. Or at least given more chapters.”

  “Which chapter are you up to now?”

  “Five.”

  “Nine” Fraa Jad said. For a moment I thought he was correcting me. Then I was afraid he was sentencing me. Finally I understood that he himself was all the way up to Chapter Nine.

  He must have spent years on it.

  Why? How had he gotten in that much trouble?

  Had it made him crazy?

  But if he was crazy or incorrigible, why had he, of all the Thousanders, been Evoked? After his Voco, why had his fraas and suurs sung the way they had—as though their hearts had been ripped out?

  “I have a lot of questions,” I said.

  “The most efficient way for you to get answers is to go north.”

  I opened my mouth to repeat my earlier objection, but he held up a hand to stay me. “I shall make every effort to see to it you are not punished.”

  It was by no means clear to me that Fraa Jad would have any such power in a giant Convox, but I didn’t have the strength of will to tell him as much to his face. Lacking that strength, I had but one way out of the conversation. “Fine. After the picnic I’ll go north. Though I do not understand what that means.”

  “Then keep going north until you understand it,” Fraa Jad said.

  Part 7

  FERAL

  Reticule: (1) In Proto-, Old, and Middle Orth, a small bag or basket, netlike in its construction. (2) In early Praxic Orth, a gridlike network of lines or fine wires on an optical device. (3) In later Praxic and New Orth, two or more syntactic devices that are able to communicate with one another.

  Reticulum: (1) When not capitalized, a reticule formed by the interconnection of two or more smaller reticules. (2) When capitalized, the largest reticulum, joining together the preponderance of all reticules in the world. Sometimes abbreviated to Ret.

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

  There was no point trying to talk Cord out of going with me. We just climbed into her fetch and started as soon as the picnic was over. We had to backtrack thirty miles to find a north-going road that would not peter out before the mountains. At the first town on that road I used up my money card buying fuel, food, and warm clothes. Then I used up Fraa Jad’s.

  While we were loading the stuff into the fetch, Ganelial Crade pulled up. Sitting next to him was Sammann. Both were grinning, which was a novelty. They didn’t have to announce that they were coming with us and we didn’t have to discuss it. They got busy buying the same sorts of things we’d just bought. Crade had an ammunition can full of coins and Sammann had information in his jeejah that worked in lieu of money; I got the sense that each of them had obtained funds from his respective community. I wasn’t happy to see Crade again. If it really was true that he was getting money for this journey from the people of Samble, it raised all sorts of questions as to what he was really up to.

  Crade had reinstated the three-wheeler in the back of his fetch, so he didn’t have much room left over; most of the bulky stuff went into Cord’s fetch. We had no idea where we were going or what to plan for, but we all seemed to be carrying roughly the same picture in our heads, namely that Orolo had gone up into the mountains for some reason. It would be cold up there and we might have to camp, so we got things like winter bedrolls, tents, stoves, and fuel. Sammann had an idea that he might be able to track Orolo, and Crade was planning to make inquiries with some of his co-religionists along the way.

  We all climbed back into our vehicles and headed north. It would be two hours’ drive to the foothills, where Crade knew of places to camp. He led the way. This was a thing he felt a compulsion to do, and I was tired of fighting it. Cord was content to follow. Crade sitting upright at the controls, and Sammann hunched over the glowing screen of his super-jeejah, gave us the feeling that the two of them must be seeing to all of the details. I wouldn’t have been comfortable following either of them alone, but together they’d never agree on anything, so I judged it was prudent.

  I regretted parting from people like Arsibalt and Lio with whom I could talk about things. But once we turned north and started forging toward the mountains, the regret vanished and instead I felt relief. So much had been revealed to me over the course of the last twenty-four hours—not only about the Cousins’ ship but even more so about the world I had lived in for ten and a half years—that it was too much for me to make sense of in one go. Just to name one example, the thatched roofs on the nuclear waste cylinders, alone, if I’d learned of it in the concent, would have taken me a little getting used to. I was much more at ease sitting next to my sib, staring out the windscreen, my sole responsibility being to chase a wild fraa across the waste. The night before, at the Bazian monastery, I had accommodated certain new, odd facts in my mind just by sleeping. A similar trick might work for me now: by doing something completely different for a few days, I might chance upon a better understanding than I could get by kneeling in a cell and concentrating on it, or having a wordy discussion in a chalk hall.

  And even if all of that was completely wrong, I didn’t care. I simply needed a break.

  Cord spent a lot of time talking on the jeejah with Rosk. She’d kissed him g
oodbye on the Samble village green. He had to go back home and work. Now there were issues of some kind to be worked out. They didn’t have just one long conversation on the jeejah. Instead they made and broke contact ten or so times. It got on my nerves and I wished we’d get to some wild reach where her link wouldn’t work. But after a while I got used to it and started to wonder: if Rosk and Cord had to do so much communicating to rig for a few days’ separation, what did that imply for me and Ala? I couldn’t stop recalling the shocked look on Tulia’s face as we had pulled out yesterday afternoon. Part of which, I was sure, came from her thinking I was being beastly to Ala.

  “Is there currently a mechanism in place for sending letters?” I asked Cord during a breather between micro-conversations with Rosk.

  “From here it’ll take some doing, but the answer is yes,” she said. Then she got a big smile. “You want to write to a girl, Raz?”

  Since I’d never mentioned Ala to her and had asked my question in such a colorless way, I was shocked and then quite irritated that she had figured this out with no effort. She was still deriving joy from the look on my face when her jeejah twittered and gave me a few minutes to get my composure back.

  “Tell me about her,” Cord demanded, as soon as she disconnected.

  “Ala. You met her. She’s the one—”

  “I remember Ala. I liked her!”

  “Really? That was not obvious to me.”

  “That and so many other things,” Cord said, in such an airy, innocent voice that it almost slipped by me. Then I had to spend a minute being silent and dignified.