Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  “No. That’s the thing. It just took off.”

  “Did it have celebrities on board or—”

  “Not that they showed. They’d show that, wouldn’t they?”

  “I wonder why they bothered to show it then. Rockets take off all the time.”

  “Well, I’m no judge of these things, but it looked like an especially big one.”

  For the first time Sammann seemed to take my meaning. “I’ll see what I can find,” he said.

  An elderly but bustling lady—one of Gnel’s co-religionists—came out with a cake that had been baked for us, then snared Gnel in a conversation that never seemed to end. While they were talking, a big, mud-splattered fetch with a wooden cabin on its back thundered into the fueling station, circled around us a couple of times, and claimed four parking spaces. The cake lady marched away, her face all pinched up. A big man with a beard shambled out of the cabin-fetch and came toward Gnel with his hands in his pockets, looking about curiously. When he got closer to Gnel he suddenly flashed a grin and extended his hand. Gnel extended his after a moment’s hesitation and let the other heave it up and down for a while. They spoke for no more than a few seconds, then the newcomer began to pace around our little encampment taking a mental inventory of what we had and reconstructing in his mind what we’d been doing there. After a few minutes of that, he unfolded a sort of deployable counter from the side of his cabin-on-wheels and fired up a stove and began to make hot beverages for us.

  “That’s Yulassetar Crade. My cousin,” Gnel told me as we watched him erect a little kitchen, blowing dust out of teacups and polishing pots with a rag from his pocket.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “What are you talking about?” Gnel asked, nonplussed.

  “It’s obvious from the way that you and that lady react to him that there is some history. Some kind of trouble between you.”

  “Yul is a here—” Gnel began, and stopped himself before he had got to the end of the word. “An apostate.”

  I wanted to ask, other than that, is he all right? but I let it drop.

  Yul made no effort to introduce himself, but when I approached him he turned to me with a smile and shook my hand before turning back to his chores. “Hold your arms out,” he said, and when I complied he put a tray on them and then placed cups of hot stuff on the tray. “For your friends,” he said.

  I insisted that he come with me, though. So after giving Gnel a cup we went over to Sammann and I introduced the two of them. Then I talked Cord into sliding out from under her fetch. She stood up and dusted herself off and shook Yul’s hand. They gave each other a funny look, which made me speculate that they might have crossed paths before. But neither one of them said anything about it. She accepted her cup and then they turned away from each other as if something embarrassing had happened.

  Yulassetar Crade gave me a lift into town so that I could run a couple of errands. First, I mailed my letter to Ala, care of the Concent of Saunt Tredegarh. The woman at the post office gave me a lot of trouble because it wasn’t properly addressed. Concents didn’t have addresses for the same reason that I didn’t have a passport. I knew I’d made a terrible mistake by not giving some sort of note to Arsibalt or Lio at the picnic in Samble. They could have smuggled it directly to Ala. Instead of which I had to mail this thing to the concent, where it would be intercepted by the hierarchs and—if they were sticking to the Discipline—kept out of Ala’s knowledge until her next Apert, more than nine years from now. I could only imagine what she’d think of me at that time, reading this yellowed document written by a boy not yet twenty years of age.

  The next stop on the itinerary was a place where we could get suitsacks: huge orange coveralls whose legs could be zipped together to make them into sleeping bags. These were made for people who hunted or scavenged in the far north. Each had a catalytic power unit built into it; as long as you kept some fuel in its bladder it would supply a modest trickle of power that was routed down the suits’ arms and legs to warming-pads placed in the soles of the boots and the palms of the mittens. New ones could be pretty expensive, but Yul had helped Orolo get a cheap one the other day. He knew of places where you could get used ones that had been fixed up, and he knew tricks for making them more comfortable.

  Once we’d taken care of that we set out in search of other gear and supplies we were going to need. Whenever I suggested going to an outdoorsy type of store, Yul winced and groaned, and then explained how better stuff could be had at one-tenth the price by using things you could buy at stores that sold housewares and groceries. He was always right, of course. He made his living as a wilderness guide, taking vacationers on trips to the mountains. Apparently he had no work at the moment, because he spent the whole day driving me around Norslof helping me improvise what we needed. When we were unable to get what we wanted at a store, he promised to supply us out of his own personal stock.

  The driving consumed an unbelievable amount of time. The traffic was always bad, or so it seemed to me. But I wasn’t used to the vehicular life of a city. When the traffic slowed to a stop, people in the mobes around us would look out the windows at Yul’s ramshackle fetch. If they were grownups they would soon look the other way, but children loved to point and stare and laugh. And they were right to do so. Yul and I were an odd pair, compared to all of these people driving to school and to work.

  At first Yul seemed to feel an obligation to be a good host—to provide entertainment during traffic jams. “Music?” he said distantly, as if music were something he had heard of once. Hearing no objection, he took to fiddling with the controls on his sound system as if they had broken off in his hands and were no longer attached to anything. Eventually he left it set on a random feed. Later, once he got to talking, I reached over and turned it off and he didn’t notice.

  Part of his job, I guessed, was to make people he’d just met (his clients) feel comfortable, which he did by telling stories. He was good at it. I tried to get him to talk about Orolo but he didn’t have much to say. Orolo might be a lot of things to me but to Yul he was just another tenderfoot who needed advice on how to travel in the rough. This did, however, lead to the topic of getting around in the far north, which he knew a lot about.

  Later I asked him if all of his travel had been in that direction and he scoffed and said that no, he’d spent years as a river guide in a region south of Samble that was gouged by deep sandstone canyons filled with spectacular rock formations. He told some good stories about such trips, but after a while became uncomfortable and stopped talking. Telling tales, it seemed, was a good way to loosen things up, a useful time-killer, but what he really wanted was a project into which he could pour his energies and his intelligence.

  At some point during the day, he stopped referring to “you” as in “You’re going to need extra fuel in case you have to melt snow to make drinking water” and began speaking of “we” as in “We should plan on at least four flat tires.”

  Yul’s house was really just a dumping ground for stuff he couldn’t fit into his fetch: camping equipment, vehicle parts, empty bottles, weapons, and books. The books were stacked in piles that came up to my hip. He didn’t seem to own any shelves. A lot of them were fiction but he also had several geology-piles. Nailed to the wall were big blown-up phototypes of colorful sedimentary rock formations, sculpted by water and wind. In his cellar, where we went to mine more equipment, he had stacks of tabular rocks—slabs of sandstone—with fossils in them.

  After we’d got everything he thought we’d need, and begun driving through another traffic jam back to the fueling station, I said to him, “You figured out that the world was old, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah,” he said immediately. “I spent years on rafts going down those rivers. Years. The whole way, there’s rocks strewn along the banks. Rocks the size of houses that fell off the canyon walls, higher up. Just looking down one of those canyons, you can see it happens all the time.”

  “You mean, rocks f
alling down.”

  “Yeah. It’s like, if you’re driving down this highway and you see skid marks on the pavement, like those right there, any idiot knows that skidding happens. If you see lots of skid marks, well, that means that skidding is common. If you see lots of fallen rocks in a canyon, then rock falls are common. So, I kept expecting to see one. Every day, I’d be drifting down the river on that raft with the clients, you know, and they’d be sleeping or talking about whatever they wanted to talk about, and I’d keep an eye on the canyon walls, waiting to see a rock fall.”

  “But you never did.”

  “Never. Not once.”

  “So you realized that the time scale had to be enormous.”

  “Yeah. I tried to figure it out once. I don’t have the theorics. But I kept an eye on that river for five years and not a single rock fell down while I was running it. If Arbre is only five thousand years old—if all the rocks in that canyon have fallen down in that short a time—I should have seen some rocks fall.”

  “The people in your ark didn’t like what you had to say about that,” I guessed.

  “There’s a reason I got out of Samble.”

  That was the end of that conversation. It was the evening rush hour now and we drove in silence for a long time. I was fascinated by the little glimpses of other people’s lives that I got through the windows of their mobes. Then I was struck by how different Yul’s life seemed to be from theirs.

  The way in which Yul had decided to join us on our journey north was strange to me. There had been no rational process: no marshaling of evidence, no weighing of options. But that was how Yul lived his whole life. He had not—I realized—been invited by Gnel to come out and pay us a visit at the fueling station. He had just shown up. He did a new thing with a new set of people every day of his life. And that made him just as different from the people in the traffic jam as I was.

  So I looked with fascination at those people in their mobes, and tried to fathom what it would be like. Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who’d made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day’s end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them. People who couldn’t live without story had been driven into the concents or into jobs like Yul’s. All others had to look somewhere outside of work for a feeling that they were part of a story, which I guessed was why Saeculars were so concerned with sports, and with religion. How else could you see yourself as part of an adventure? Something with a beginning, middle, and end in which you played a significant part? We avout had it ready-made because we were a part of this project of learning new things. Even if it didn’t always move fast enough for people like Jesry, it did move. You could tell where you were and what you were doing in that story. Yul got all of this for free by living his stories from day to day, and the only drawback was that the world held his stories to be of small account. Perhaps that was why he felt such a compulsion to tell them, not just about his own exploits in the wilderness, but those of his mentors.

  We at last reached the fueling station. Yul deployed his traveling kitchen and began to make supper. He made no formal announcement that he was coming with us, but this was obvious from the way he talked, and so after a while Gnel went into the station and struck a deal with the management for Cord to leave her fetch parked there for a couple of weeks. Cord began to move things from her fetch into Yul’s. As he cooked, Yul observed this procedure closely, and soon began to complain, in a joking way, about the enormous volume of unnecessary clutter that Cord was, according to him, stuffing into his home-on-wheels. Cord soon began to volley the abuse back at him. Within about sixty seconds they were saying amazingly rude things to each other. I couldn’t take part in their banter any more than I could get between two persons who were kissing or fighting, so I drifted over to Sammann.

  “I found that rocket speely,” he told me. “You were right about its being big. That’s one of the largest rockets going nowadays.”

  “Anything else?”

  “The payload,” he said. “Its shape and size match those of a vehicle that is generally used to carry humans into space.”

  “How many humans?”

  “Up to eight.”

  “Well, is there any information about who is on board, or why they’re going up there?”

  Sammann shook his head. “Not unless you count the absence of information as information.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “According to the Powers That Be, the vehicle is unmanned. It’s a test of a new system. Under syndev control.”

  I gave him a look. He grinned and held up his hands. “I know, I know! I’ve made inquiries on a few reticules known to me. In a few days maybe we’ll have something.”

  “In a few days we’ll be at the North Pole.”

  “In a few days,” he said, “that might be a wise place to be.”

  The next morning, after a large breakfast prepared by Yul and Cord, we started the journey north. Cord’s fetch stayed behind. Our caravan consisted of the Crade vehicles, that of Yulassetar containing most of the gear, that of Ganelial carrying his three-wheeler in the back.

  The first leg was north and downhill to the coastal plain, a turn to the right when we neared salt water, and then a long sweeping leftward curve as we skirted a gulf of the northern ocean. At the head of that gulf lay what had been the greatest port in the world for a couple of centuries back in the First Millennium A.R. when the water had stayed ice-free all year round. Because of its location it had later become the “shallowest” of all ruins—the easiest to mine. Most of its great works—its viaducts, seawalls, and bridges—had been hammered apart by scavengers who had extracted the reinforcing bars buried in the synthetic stone and shipped the metal to places where it was needed. The rubble-mounds were forested with immense trees. The only remaining structure from that age was a suspension bridge over the great river that emptied into the head of the gulf; it was high enough above sea level that the resurgent pack ice had not crushed it. At this time of year there was no ice to be seen, but it was easy to make out the scars it had left along the rubble-banks. This port-ruin now functioned as a fishing village and drummon stop. A few hundred people lived here, at least in the summer. Once we left it behind and struck inland, heading almost due north, we saw only scattered settlements, which thinned and failed as we climbed into forested hills. We then descended into an unmistakably different landscape: taiga, a country too dry and cold for trees to grow much higher than a person’s head. Almost all traffic had vanished from the highway. We drove for an hour without seeing any other vehicles. Finally we stopped in a rocky place near a river, pulled our vehicles round to where they couldn’t be seen from the road, and slept in our suitsacks.

  The next morning, the brand-new stove we had bought after leaving Samble stopped working. If Yul hadn’t joined us, we’d have spent the rest of the trip eating cold energy bars. Yul, looking quietly triumphant, produced a thunderous breakfast on his battery of roaring industrial burners. Watching his cousin work, Gnel seemed proud, if exasperated. As if to say, look at what fine people we can produce when they stop believing in our religion.

  Since there was almost no traffic on the road, I took driving lessons from Yul while Cord dismantled the stove. She diagnosed the problem as a clogged orifice, attributable to gunk that had precipitated from the fuel during the cold night.

  “You’re fuming,” she pointed out a while later. I realized that I
had withdrawn from the conversation. She and Yul had been talking, but I hadn’t heard a word of their conversation. “What is the problem?”

  “I just can’t believe that in this day and age we are having a problem with chemical fuel,” I said.

  “Sorry. We should have bought the premium brand.”

  “No, it’s not that. Nothing for you to be sorry about. I’m just pointing out that this stove is four-thousand-year-old praxis.”

  Cord was nonplussed. “Same goes for this fetch and everything in it,” she said.

  “Hey!” Yul cried, mock-wounded.

  Cord scoffed, rolled her eyes, and turned her attention back to me. “Everything except for your sphere, that is. So?”

  “I guess because I live in a place with almost zero praxis, it never occurs to me to think about such things,” I said. “But at times like this, the absurdity hits me between the eyes. There’s no reason to put up with junk like this. A stove with dangerous, unreliable chemical fuel. With orifices that clog. In four thousand years we could have made a better stove.”

  “Would I be able to take that stove apart and fix it?”

  “You wouldn’t have to, because it would never break.”

  “But I want to know if I could understand such a stove.”

  “You’re the kind of person who could probably understand just about anything if you set your mind to it.”

  “Nice flattery, Raz, but you keep dodging the question.”

  “All right, I take your point. You’re really asking if the average person could understand the workings of such a thing…”

  “I don’t know what an average person is. But look at Yul here. He built his stove himself. Didn’t you, Yul?”

  Yul was uneasy that Cord had suddenly made this conversation about him. But he deferred to her. He glanced away and nodded. “Yup. Got the burners from scavengers. Welded up the frame.”

  “And it worked,” Cord said.

  “I know,” I said, and patted my belly.