Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  “She and I have hated each other pretty much our whole lives,” I said. “Especially recently. Then we started something. It was pretty sudden. Really wonderful though.”

  Cord gave me a grateful smile and almost swerved off the road.

  “The next day she was Evoked. This was before we knew it was going to become a Convox, so in effect she was dead to me after that. This was, I guess, pretty upsetting to me. I sort of put it out of my mind by working. Then when I got Evoked yesterday—which seems like ten years ago now—it opened up the possibility that I might see her again. But then a few hours later I decided to make this little detour—which just turned into a bigger detour. As a matter of fact, I am technically a Feral now and so I might never see her again because of the way I just let Fraa Jad push me around. So you might say things are complicated. Hard to say just how long I’d have to spend on a jeejah with her, sorting this one out.”

  Cord took another call from Rosk then, and by the time she was finished, I was ready with more: “Mind you, I’m not just whining about my own situation here. Everything’s confused. This is the biggest upheaval since the Third Sack. So many weird things are going on—it almost makes a mockery of the Discipline.”

  “But your way isn’t just that set of rules,” Cord said. “It’s who you are—you follow that way for bigger reasons. And as long as you stay true to that, the confusion you’re talking about will sort itself out eventually.”

  I would have been fine with that except for one problem: it sounded like the mentality that Edharians were accused of having by people who believed in all of that Lineage stuff that Criscan had been telling us about. So an instinct told me to say nothing.

  Then Cord sprang the trap on me: “And likewise you could drive yourself crazy trying to sort through all of these ins and outs in your relationship with Ala, but if you send her a letter—which is a great idea—you shouldn’t get into all of that. Just skip it.”

  “Skip it?”

  “Yeah. Just tell her how you feel.”

  “I feel jerked around. That’s how I feel. You want me to say that?”

  “No, no, no. Tell her how you feel about her.”

  My gaze dropped to her jeejah, sitting on the seat between us, silent for once. “Are you sure you haven’t been taking calls from Tulia on that thing? Because I have the feeling you guys have your own private reticule. Like—”

  “Like the Ita?” This would have been insulting if I’d said it, but she thought it was hilarious. We both looked up the road at the back of Sammann’s head silhouetted against his jeejah screen. “That’s right,” Cord said, “we’re the girl Ita and if you don’t do what we say, we’re going to Throw the Book at you!”

  Cord had a notebook that she used as a maintenance log for her fetch, so I used a blank page to begin a letter to Ala. This went about as badly as it was possible for a written document to go. I tore it out and started again. I couldn’t get used to the way the disposable poly pen shat pasty ink onto the slick machine-made paper. I tore it out and started yet again.

  I had to suspend work on the fourth draft because Ganelial Crade had led us off the paved road and onto a dirt track better suited for his fetch than for Cord’s. The lower, south-facing slopes of the mountains were covered with fuel tree plantations and crisscrossed with dirt roads such as this one, alive with rampaging log trucks, dusty and dangerous to us. We spent an unpleasant half-hour getting through that zone. Then we climbed to where the growing season was too short and the grades too steep for that industry, or indeed for any kind of economic activity save recreation.

  He led us to a beautiful camping place at the edge of a tarn in the hills. People came here to hunt in the autumn, he said, but no one was here today. All of our equipment was new and we had to take it out of boxes and dispose of the wrappers and tags and instruction manuals before we could do anything with it. We started a bonfire with these and sustained it with fallen dead timber. As the sun went down, this settled to a bed of coals on which we cooked cheeseburgs. Cord bedded down in her fetch and the three men got ready to share a tent. I stayed up late and finished my letter to Ala by firelight. Which was a good way to do it; the seventh draft was short and simple. I just kept asking myself: if fate had it that we’d never see each other again, what would I need to say to her?

  The next day started out refreshingly devoid of great events, new people, and astonishing revelations. We got up slowly in the cold, lighted the stove, heated up some rations, and got on the road. Crade was happy. It was not in his nature to be that way but he was happy here and now, strutting all over the place telling us the best way to pack our bedrolls and attending to every detail of the camp stove as if it were a nuclear reactor. But he was much easier to be around in such circumstances, where he actually had something to do with all of his energies. I decided that he was too intelligent for his circumstances and that he’d missed an opportunity to be an avout. If he’d been born among the slines he’d have ended up on a concent. Instead he’d landed among a sect that valued his brains too much to let him go. But his brains had no purpose there. Anyway, he was used to being the only smart person within a hundred miles and now that he’d been thrown together with other smart people he didn’t know how to behave.

  Sammann was badly out of his element—he could hardly pick up anything on his jeejah—but he managed well, as if prolonged suffering were a standard part of the Ita tool kit. He had a shoulder bag that was for him what Cord’s vest was for her, and he kept pulling out useful tools and gadgets. Or so it seemed to me, as I was not used to owning things.

  Cord was quiet unless I looked at her, whereupon she’d become grumpy. I was bored and impatient. When we finally got going again, I guessed it must be about midday. But according to the clock in Cord’s fetch, midday was not for another three hours.

  We went up into the mountains. This was new to me. Any travel would have been new to me. When I’d been a kid, before I’d been Collected, I’d left town a few times—tagging along on trips that my elders made to visit friends or kin in the near country. After I’d joined the Concent, of course, I hadn’t traveled at all. And I hadn’t missed it. I hadn’t known what there was to miss. Up in those hills and mountains, seeing natural leads of open space through the forest, pale green meadows, old logging roads, abandoned fortresses, decrepit cabins, and collapsed palaces, I began to think of these as places I might go, if I had the time to stop and go for a walk. In that way the landscape was altogether different from the concent, all of whose paths had been trodden for thousands of years, and where going into the cellar of Shuf’s Dowment seemed intrepid. It made me wonder where my mind might ramble, and where events might take me, now that circumstances had forced me to leave the concent and venture into such places.

  Cord changed the music. The popular songs she’d been playing the previous days felt wrong here. Their beautiful parts did not stand comparison with what we could see out the windows, and their coarse parts jarred. She owned a recording of the music of the concent, which we sold in the market outside the Day Gate alongside our honey and our mead. She started playing random selections from it, beginning with a lament for the Third Sack. To Cord, this was just Selection Number 37. To me it was just about the most powerful piece of music we had. We sang it only once a year, at the end of a week spent fasting and reciting the names of the dead and the titles of the books burned. Somehow, the feeling was right: if the Cousins turned out to be hostile, they might Sack the world.

  We came around a turn and were confronted by a wall of purple stone that went up until it disappeared in a cloud layer a mile above our heads. It must have stood there for a million years. Seeing it while I heard the lament, I felt what I can only describe as patriotism for my planet. Until this moment in history there had never been any call for such feelings because there’d never been anything beyond Arbre except for points of light in the sky. Now that had changed, and instead of thinking of myself as a member of the Provener team, or of the
Decenarian math, or of the Edharian order, I felt like a citizen of the world and I was proud to be doing my little bit to protect it. I was comfortable being a Feral.

  Casinos and speelies weren’t the only new experiences you had when you went extramuros. Even if you traveled solo and stuck to the wild places—even if you never saw a strip mall or heard a word of Fluccish—you were getting information, not about the Saecular world but about the world that had been there before it, the ground state that cultures and civilizations emerged from and collapsed back into. The wellsprings of the Saecular—but also of the mathic world. The origin where, seven thousand years ago, those worlds had diverged.

  * * *

  Sea of Seas: A relatively small but complex body of salt water, connected to Arbre’s great oceans in three places by straits, and generally viewed as the cradle of classical civilization.

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

  We crested the pass and descended into a small city, Norslof. This took me by surprise. I’d seen the cartabla. But in the fantasy map of the world that I carried in my head, the mountains went on much farther.

  We had not found Orolo, but we had at least made one pass over the landscape. Along the way we had taken note of a few places where he might have gone. Most promising of these, to my mind, had been a small, tatterdemalion math constructed on a lookout tower originally put there to detect forest fires. It was a few miles off the road and a few thousand feet above it. We’d noticed it shortly after topping the pass. If it had been a full-sized concent they wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with someone like Orolo, but such an out-of-the-way math might have welcomed an Orth-speaking wanderer who could bring them some new ideas.

  We stopped to eat and use toilets at a big drummon-refueling station several miles outside of Norslof’s commercial center. Here it was possible to rent rooms and it was permissible to sleep in one’s vehicle. I had an idea that we might use it as a base from which to double back into the mountains and search for Orolo. I changed my mind when we walked into the mess hall, steamy and redolent of cured meats, and all of the long-range drummon operators turned to stare at us. It was obvious that they didn’t get many customers such as us and that they preferred it that way. Part of it must have been that we were a group of four in a room full of singletons. But even if we’d come in one by one, we would have drawn stares. Sammann was dressed in normal-looking extramuros garb, but his long beard and hair were not the norm, and the bone structure of his face marked him ethnically. The men in this room would not be able to peg him as Ita—supposing they even knew what the Ita were—but they could tell he was not one of them. Cord did not dress or move like their women. Her repertoire of gestures and facial expressions was altogether disjoint from theirs. Ganelial, being an extra, ought to have blended—but somehow didn’t. He belonged to a religious community that went to great lengths to preserve its apartness from the cultural baseline and he proclaimed as much in the way he carried himself and the looks he gave people. And I: I had no idea how I looked. Since leaving the concent I’d spent most of my time among extras who knew that I was an avout on Peregrin. Here I was trying to pass for something I wasn’t, and it seemed best to assume I was doing a terrible job of it.

  We might have drawn even more attention had it not been for the fact that there were speelies all over the place. They were mounted to the ceiling, angled down toward the tables. All of them ran the same feed in lockstep. At the moment we walked in the door, this showed a house burning down at night. It was surrounded by emergency workers. A close-up showed a woman leaning out of an upper-story window that was vomiting black smoke. She had a towel wrapped around her face. She dropped a baby. I kept watching to see what happened next, but instead the speely cycled back and showed the baby drop two more times in slow motion. Then that scene vanished and was replaced by images of a ball player making a clever play. But then it showed the same ball player breaking his leg later in the game. This too was repeated several times in slow motion so that you could see the leg bending at the site of the break. By the time we reached our table, the speelies were showing an extraordinarily beautiful man in expensive clothes being arrested by police. My companions glanced at the images from time to time, then looked away. It seemed that they had built up some kind of immunity. I couldn’t keep my eyes off them, so I tried to sit in a position where there wasn’t a speely directly in front of me. Still, every time the feed popped from one image to another, my eye jumped to it. I was like an ape in a tree, looking at whatever moved fastest in my environment.

  We sat in the corner, ordered food, and talked quietly. The room, which had gone silent when we’d entered, slowly defrosted and was replenished by the normal low murmur of conversation. It occurred to me that we should not have chosen a corner table because this would make it impossible for us to get out quickly if there was some kind of trouble.

  I missed Lio badly. He would have assessed the threats, if any, and thought about how to counter them. And he might have gotten it completely wrong, as he had with Estemard and his sidearm. But at least he would have taken care of these matters so that I could worry about other things.

  Take Sammann as an example. When he’d joined us I’d been glad of his company, as he knew how to do so many things that I didn’t. Which was all fine when it was just four of us camped by a tarn. But now that we were deep in the Saecular world I recalled the ancient taboo against contact between avout and Ita, which we could not have been breaking any more flagrantly. Did these people know of that taboo? If so, did they understand why it had been instated? Were we, in other words, stirring memories and awakening fears of old? Would their police protect us from a mob—or join in with them?

  Ganelial Crade started canvassing his local brethren on his jeejah. This grew obnoxious, and when he noticed that we were all glaring at him, he got up and moved to an empty table. I asked Sammann if he could pull up any information on the lookout-tower math and he began to view maps and satellite photos on his jeejah that were much better than the stored charts on the cartabla. I’d rarely seen anything like these pictures, which must have been very like what the Cousins could see of Arbre from their ship. This answered a question that had been rattling around in my head since yesterday morning. “Hey,” I said, “I think Orolo was looking at such pictures. He put a few up on the wall of his cell.”

  “It’s too bad you didn’t tell me that before,” said Sammann curtly. Not for the first time I got the feeling that we avout were children and the Ita, far from being a subservient caste, were our minders. I was about to apologize. Then I got the feeling that once I started apologizing I’d never be able to stop. Somehow I managed to arrest my embarrassment before it reached the mud-on-the-head stage.

  (on the speely: an old building being blown up; people celebrating)

  “Okay, well, now that you mention it, Fraa Jad went out of his way to make sure I came away with them,” I said, and pulled from my shirt pocket the folded-up phototypes of the big hole in the ground. I spread them out on the table. Three heads converged and bent over them. Even Ganelial Crade—who had taken to pacing back and forth as he yammered on his jeejah—slowed down for a look-see. But no light of recognition came into his face. “That looks like a mine. Probably in the tundra,” he said, just to be saying something.

  “The sun is shining almost straight down into it,” I pointed out.

  “So?”

  “So it can’t be at a high latitude.”

  Now it was Crade’s turn to be embarrassed. He turned away and pretended to be extremely involved in his jeejah conversation.

  (on the speely: phototypes of a kidnapped child, blurry footage of the kid being led out of a casino by a man in a big hat)

  “I was wondering,” I said to Sammann, “if you could, I don’t know, use your jeejah to start scanning the globe and look for such features. I know it would be like finding a needle in a haystack. But if we were systematic about it, and if we worked in shifts for long enou
gh—”

  Sammann responded to my idea in much the same spirit as I had to Crade’s suggestion that this thing was in the tundra. He held his jeejah up above the picture and took a phototype of the phototype. Then he spent a few seconds interacting with the machine. Then he showed me what had come up on its screen: a different picture of the same hole in the ground. Except now it was a live feed from the Reticulum.

  “You found it,” I said, because I wanted to go slowly and make sure I understood what was going on.

  “A syntactic program available on the Reticulum found it,” he corrected me. “It turns out to be a long way from here—on an island in the Sea of Seas.”

  “Can you tell me the name of the island?”

  “Ecba.”

  “Ecba!?” I exclaimed.

  “Is there a way to figure out what it is?” Cord asked.

  Sammann zoomed in. But this was almost unnecessary. Now that I knew it was on Ecba, I was no longer inclined to see this hole as an open-pit mine. It was clearly an excavation—it was completely encircled by mounded-up earth that had been taken out of it. And a ramp spiraled around to its flat bottom. But it was too orderly, too prim for a mine. Its flat bottom was neatly gridded.

  “It is an archaeological dig,” I said. “A huge one.”

  “What’s there on Ecba to dig up?” Cord asked.

  “I can search for that,” Sammann said, and got ready to do so.

  “Wait! Zoom out. Again…and again,” I asked him.

  We could now see the dig as a pale scar several miles south-southeast of a huge, solitary mountain that ramped up out of a wrinkled sea. The upper slopes of the mountain were patched with snow but its summit had a scoop taken out of it: a caldera.

  “That is Orithena,” I said.

  “The mountain?” Cord asked.