Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  “No, I mean the system worked!” Cord insisted.

  “What system?”

  She was exasperated. “The…the…”

  “The non-system,” Yul said. “The lack of a system.”

  “Yul knew that stoves like this were unreliable!” Cord said, nodding at the broken one. “He’d learned that from experience.”

  “Oh, bitter experience, my girl!” Yul proclaimed.

  “He ran into some scavengers who’d found better burner heads in a ruin up north. Haggled with them. Figured out a way to hook them up. Probably has been tinkering with them ever since.”

  “Took me two years to make it run right,” Yul admitted.

  “And none of that would have been possible with some kind of technology that only an avout can understand,” Cord concluded.

  “Okay, okay,” I said, and let it drop there. Letting the argument play out would have been a waste of breath. We, the theors, who had retreated (or, depending on how you liked your history, been herded) into the maths at the Reconstitution, had the power to change the physical world through praxis. Up to a point, ordinary people liked the changes we made. But the more clever the praxis became, the less people understood it and the more dependent they became on us—and they didn’t like that at all.

  Cord spent a while telling Yul what she knew about the Cousins, and about all that had happened during the journey from Saunt Edhar to Samble to Norslof. Yul took it pretty calmly, which irked me. I wanted to grab him by the shoulders and shake him and make him see, somehow, that this was an event of cosmic significance: the most important thing that had ever happened. But he listened to Cord’s narration as if she were relating a story of how she had fixed a flat tire on her way to work. Perhaps it was a habit of wilderness guides to feign unnatural calm when people ran up to them with upsetting news.

  Anyway, it gave me an opening to carry forward the stove argument in a way that wouldn’t make Cord so irritated. When the conversation lapsed, I tried: “I see why you guys—or anyone—would feel more comfortable with a stove you could take apart and understand. And I’m fine with that—normally. But these are not normal times. If the Cousins turn out to be hostile, how can we oppose them? Because it looks like they came from a world that didn’t have anything like the Reconstitution.”

  “A dictatorship of the theors,” Yul said.

  “It doesn’t have to be a dictatorship! If you could see how theors behave in private, you’d know they could never be that organized.”

  But Cord was of one mind with Yul on this. “Once they get to the point where they’re building ships like that one,” she said, “it is a dictatorship in effect. You said yourself it would take the resources of a whole planet. How do you think they got their hands on those resources?”

  In most cases Cord and I saw things the same way and the extra/avout split simply was not important to us, so when she talked this way it made me more upset than I cared to let on. I let it drop for a while. On these endless drives, it was nothing to let the conversation pause for an hour or two.

  And there was something else going on, which was that everything had changed about Cord when Yul had showed up. These two simply knew what to do around each other. Whatever was going on between them, I wasn’t part of it, and I felt jealous.

  We passed through another ruin-city, almost as “shallow” as yesterday’s and almost as thoroughly erased.

  “The Cousins’ praxis is nothing to jump up and down about,” I said. “We haven’t seen anything on that ship that couldn’t have been built in our own Praxic Age. That makes me think that we could build a weapon that could disable their ship.”

  Cord smiled and the tension was gone. “You sound like Fraa Jad the other day!” she exclaimed, with obvious affection—for me.

  “Oh really? What did the old man say?” I could hear the hurt draining out of my own speech.

  She adopted a pretty good imitation of his grumbling voice. “‘Their electrical systems could be disabled by a burst of whozamajigger fields.’ Then Lio said, ‘Begging your pardon, Fraa Jad, but we don’t know how to make those.’ ‘Why, it’s simple, just build a phrastic array of whatsit-field inducers.’ ‘Sorry, Fraa Jad, but no one knows those theorics any more and it takes thirty years’ study to get up to speed!’ and so on.”

  I laughed. But then—tallying the days in my head—I realized something: “They’re probably reaching Tredegarh right now. Probably starting to talk about how to make those whatsit field inducers.”

  “I would hope so!”

  “The Saecular Power probably has tons of information about the Cousins that has been withheld from us until now. Maybe they’ve even been going up there and talking to the Cousins. I’ll bet they are giving all of that information to the fraas and suurs at the Convox. I wish I was there. I’m tired of not understanding! Instead I’m helping Fraa Jad understand why a Throwback wants to visit a seven-century-old archaeological dig.” I slapped the control panel helplessly.

  “Hey!” Yul said in mock outrage and pretended to haul off and punch me in the shoulder.

  “I guess that’s part of being a pawn,” I went on.

  “Your vision of what the Convox is like sounds pretty romantic to me,” Cord said. “Way too optimistic. Remember the first day at the machine-hall when we were trying to get seventeen people into six vehicles?”

  “Vividly.”

  “This Convox thing is probably like that except a thousand times worse.”

  “Unless there’s someone like me there,” Yul said. “You should see the way I can get seventeen tourists into four rafts.”

  “Well, Yul’s not at Tredegarh,” Cord pointed out, “so you’re not missing a thing. Just relax and enjoy the drive.”

  “Okay,” I said, and laughed a little. “Your understanding of human nature is better than mine.”

  “What’s her problem with me then?” Yul demanded.

  As the drive went on, most of us bounced back and forth between the two vehicles. The exception was Gnel who always remained in his fetch, though sometimes he’d let Sammann drive it.

  The next day, when Cord and I were alone together for a couple of hours, she told me that she and Yul had become boyfriend and girlfriend.

  “Huh,” I said, “I guess that explains why you two spend so much time out ‘gathering firewood.’” I wasn’t trying to be a smarty-pants, just trying to emulate the kind of banter that Cord and Yul exchanged so freely. But Cord became quite embarrassed and I realized that I had struck too close to home. I groped around for something else to say. “Well, now that you’ve told me, it seems like it was meant to be. I guess I just didn’t see it because I had this idea that you were going out with Rosk.”

  Cord thought that was pretty silly. “Remember all those conversations I was having with him on my jeejah the other day?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, what we were really doing was breaking up.”

  “Well, Cord, I hate to be a pedantic avout, but I couldn’t help overhearing your half of those conversations, and I don’t think I heard a single word that was even remotely about breaking up.”

  She looked at me as if I were insane.

  “All I’m saying,” I said, holding up my hands, “is that I had no idea that that was what was going on.”

  “Neither did I,” Cord said.

  “Do you think…” I began, and stopped. I’d been about to say Do you think that Rosk knows? but I realized in the nick of time that it would be suicide. It seemed to me like a pretty irregular way to handle important relationships, but then I remembered how things had gone with me and Ala and decided I was in no position to criticize my sib on that score.

  Cord and I had talked surprisingly little about our family—that is, the family I’d shared with her until I’d “gone to the clock.” But what little I’d heard had left me amazed by how clever people were at finding ways to make each other crazy and miserable, whether it was those they were related to or a crowd of s
trangers they’d been thrown together with in a concent. Cord sometimes seemed eighty years old in her knowledge and experience and cynicism about such things. I couldn’t help thinking she’d thrown up her hands at some point and decided to devote the rest of her life to mastering things, such as machines, that could be made sense of and fixed. No wonder she hated the idea of machines she couldn’t understand. And no wonder she didn’t waste a lot of time trying to understand things she couldn’t—like why she was now Yul’s girlfriend.

  When the climate had been warmer, civilizations had sloshed back and forth across this glacier-planed landscape for a couple of thousand years like silt in a miner’s pan, forming drifts of built-up stuff that stayed long after the people had departed. At any given moment during those millennia, a billion might have lived on this territory that now supported a few tens of thousands. How many bodies were buried up here, how many people’s ashes scattered? Ten, twenty, fifty billion all told? Given that they all used electricity, how many miles of copper wire had been sewn through their buildings and under their pavements? How many man-years had been devoted to the one activity of pulling and stapling those wires into place? If one out of a thousand was an electrician, something like a billion man-years had been devoted to running wire from one point to another. After the weather had grown cold again and the civilizations had, over the course of a few centuries, shifted south—moving like glaciers—scavengers had begun coming up here to undo those billion man-years one tedious hour at a time, and retrieve those countless miles of wire yard by yard. Professional scavengers working on an industrial scale had gotten ninety percent of it quickly. I’d seen pictures of factories on tank treads that rolled across the north and engulfed whole city blocks at a time, treating the fabric of the ruins just as a mining robot would an ore-rich hill, grinding the buildings to rubble and sorting the shards according to density. The first ruins we had seen were the feces that those machines left along their paths.

  Stripping ruins by hand was more expensive. When times were prosperous elsewhere, metals became precious enough that miners could make a life out of venturing to the deep ruins—far-flung cities of old, never reached by the factories-on-tank-treads—and extracting whatever was most valuable: copper wires, steel beams, plumbing, or what have you. The swag made its way toward the road we were driving in fitful stages, from one anarchic little tundra market-town to the next. Snowstorms and arctic pirate-bands might impede its progress but eventually it found the road and was piled on the backs of ramshackle drummons that seemed to consist of seventy-five percent rust by weight, held together only by rimes of ice and shaggy cloaks of dirty snow. These moved in caravans for protection, so it was hopeless to try to pass them, but they moved fast enough for our purposes and they afforded us the safety of the herd once they’d figured out we were pilgrims, not pirates. We stayed well back of them so that we’d have time to swerve whenever a rigid glyph of plumbing or a hairball of wire fell off onto the road. Our windscreen grew opaque with tire-flung mud-ice. We kept the side windows open so that we could reach out and wipe it off with rags on sticks. On the third day the rags froze; after that we kept the stove running with a pot of warm water on top of it, to thaw them out. Through our open windows we looked at ruins passing by. We learned to tell what age a place had been built by the character of its fortifications: missile silos, three-mile-long runways, curtain walls, stone ramparts, acres of curled razor barbs, belts of sequence-engineered thorn trees, all more or less torn down and deranged by scavengers.

  As the days went on, all of this stuff was dusted, then frosted, then choked, flattened, crushed, drowned, obliterated by ice. After that, the only things we saw that had been put there by humans were wrecks of former sledge ports: fluctuations of climate or of markets had left them defenseless long enough to die. The landscape a mile from the road was clean and white, that along the road was the most disgusting thing I’d seen the whole trip. The snow-piles along the sides of the road grew higher and blacker until our way became a carbon-black slit trench twenty feet deep, crammed with drummons moving about as fast as a healthy person could walk. After that there was no escape. We could have shut off our vehicles’ engines and the drummon behind us would have shoved us all the way to the end of the road. They had snorkels to draw fresh air down into their cabs. We hadn’t thought to so equip ourselves, and spent the last day breathing oily blue exhaust. When this became too sickening to endure we would swap drivers and climb up out of the trench (there were occasional ramps in the snow-walls) and simply walk alongside for a while (we had bought snowshoes, improvised from scavenged building materials, in one of the tundra markets) or ride on Gnel’s three-wheeler.

  It was on one of those trudges—the very last leg—that Yul finally asked me about the parking ramp dinosaur.

  Ever since our day together in Norslof, it had been clear he’d wanted to get something off his chest. When he and Cord had suddenly become an item, he’d avoided being alone with me for a couple of days. But once it was clear that I was not going to go nonlinear, he’d begun a gentle search for opportunities to talk to me one-on-one. I’d assumed the topic was going to be him and Cord. But Yul was full of surprises.

  “Some say it was a dinosaur, some say dragon,” I told him. “One of the first things we were taught about the incident is that nothing can be known of it for certain—”

  “Since all evidence was wiped out by the Incanters?”

  “That’s one story. The second thing we were taught, by the way, was that we should never discuss the incident with Saeculars.”

  He got a frustrated look.

  “Sorry,” I said, “that’s just how it is. Most accounts agree that one group, let’s call them Group A, started it, and Group B finished it. In popular folkore, A equals the so-called Rhetors and B equals the so-called Incanters. It happened three months before the opening of the Third Sack.”

  “But the dinosaur—or the dragon or whatever—really did appear in the parking ramp.”

  Yul and I were walking side-by-side on compacted snow, a stone’s throw off to the right side of the drummon-jammed slit trench. Closer to it, conditions were dangerous because men, many of them intoxicated, were zipping back and forth on snow machines. The track that Yul and I were following appeared to have been laid down by such a machine a day or two earlier. We could tell where our fetches were in the trench because we’d learned to recognize the jury-rigged snorkels of the adjoining drummons. The traffic seemed to be accelerating slightly, so that we had to mush harder in order to keep pace. This was probably because we were only a couple of miles from the sledge port. We could see its antennas, its smoke, and its lights a couple of miles ahead. Even if the fetches outdistanced us, we’d be able to reach it on foot, so we weren’t overly concerned about keeping up.

  “It was only a couple of thousand feet away from Muncoster,” I said. “There was a city there—as there is now. Overall level of affluence and praxic development, let’s say nine on a scale of ten.”

  “Where are we today?” Yul asked.

  “Let’s say eight. But the society around Muncoster had peaked, though they didn’t know it yet. Deolaters were gaining political influence.”

  “Which Ark?”

  “I don’t know. One of those that is aggressive about garnering power. They had an iconography—”

  “A what?”

  “Well,” I said, “let’s just say that they felt threatened by certain things that avout tend to believe.”

  “Such as that the world is old,” Yul said.

  “Yeah. There had been trouble at a couple of Annual Aperts, and bigger trouble at the Decennial of 2780. The Tenners’ math got sacked a little on Tenth Night. But then things seemed to calm down. Apert was over. Things went back to normal. So, now, a parking ramp was then under construction within sight of the concent. It was part of a shopping center. The avout could see it going up, just by looking out the windows of their towers—Muncoster has a lot of towers. The ramp was f
inished a few months later. Saeculars went in there every day and parked their cars. No problem. Six years passed. The shopping center expanded. The workers had to make some structural changes to the parking ramp so that they could attach a new wing. One of them was up on the fourth level, using a pneumatic hammer to demolish part of the floor, when he noticed something embedded in the synthetic stone. It looked like a claw. Investigating, they removed more and more stone. It was a major safety issue since the building isn’t structurally sound if there are such things as claws and bones in load-bearing members. They had to shore it up—the building was weakening, sagging, before their eyes. The more they uncovered, the worse it got. When all was said and done, they had uncovered a complete skeleton of a hundred-foot-long reptile embedded in synthetic stone that had only been poured four years earlier. The Deolaters didn’t know what to make of it. There started to be serious unrest and violence around the walls of the concent. Then one night, chanting was heard from the Thousanders’ tower. It went on all night. The next day, the parking ramp was back to normal. So the story goes.”

  “Do you believe it?” Yul asked.

  “Something happened. There were—are—records.”

  “You mean, like, phototypes of the skeleton?”

  “I’m referring more to things like the memories in the witnesses’ minds. Piles of lumber used to shore up the structure. The paperwork at the lumberyard. A little bit of additional wear on the tires of the drummons that carried the lumber to the site.”

  “Like ripples spreading out,” Yul said.

  “Yeah. So if the skeleton suddenly vanishes, and there’s no physical evidence it was ever there, what do you have left?”

  “Only the records,” Yul said, nodding vigorously, as if he understood it better than I. “The ripples, without the splash.”

  “The tires of the lumber drummon didn’t suddenly get un-worn. The paperwork at the lumberyard didn’t vanish from the files. But now there is a conflict. The world isn’t coherent any more—there are logical contradictions.”