Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  If I were still feeling bad about it, Sark concluded, I should try to put on a better showing the next time the Condemned Man saw fit to relate some part of my affairs in that celestial court.

  Some of the others had even worse stories to tell to the magister. I could not believe some of what I heard. I wasn’t the only first-timer in this congregation; it had been clear from the smirks on others’ faces that they too had been dragooned into coming here. I suspected that some were embellishing their stories just to see if they could freak out the magister.

  Apparently the rule for these services was that after all present had stated what they had to state, the magister would wind things up with a rip-roarer.

  “It has been our way since of old to say that the day of the Magistrate’s final judgment is coming. It is forever coming. But today I tell you that it is here. Signs and portents have made it plain! The Magistrate, or his bailiff, has been sighted in the heavens above! He has turned his red eye upon the avout in their concents and rendered his judgment upon them. Now he turns his eye upon the rest of us! The so-called Warden of Heaven has gone before him to make his entreaties, and the Magistrate has seen him for what he is, and cast him out in wrath! What shall he make of you who are gathered together in this cabin? On his final day before that court, of whom shall the Condemned Man speak? Shall he tell of you, Vit, and of your doings? To prove that he, and all his creations, are worthy of life, shall he tell of you, Traid, or you, Theras, or you, Ever-ell? Shall it be your doings on the final day that tip the scales of judgment one way or the other?”

  It was a tough question—was meant to be. Magister Sark had no intention of answering it. Instead he looked long and deep into each man’s eyes.

  Except for mine. I was staring at a bulkhead. Trying to figure out what he’d meant. The Magistrate had been seen in the heavens? The Warden of Heaven had been cast out in wrath? Was I supposed to read those statements literally?

  If something bad had happened to the Warden of Heaven, what did it mean for Jesry?

  I was desperate to know. I didn’t dare ask.

  When it was over, I was too drained to move. As the cabin emptied out I sat slumped against a steel bulkhead, letting the ship’s engines jiggle my brain around.

  One of the other Kedevs had been talking to Alwash. When the cabin was nearly empty they approached me. I sat up and tried to muster strength to fight back another religious harangue.

  This new guy’s name was Malter. “I was wondering,” Malter said, “are you one of the avout?”

  I did not move or speak. I was trying to remember what the Kelx thought of us.

  “The reason I ask,” Malter went on, “is that there were rumors going around town, before we shipped out, that an avout in disguise had come down the glacier in the last few days and got into trouble just like what you described.”

  I was startled. Not for long. It was easy to imagine Laro raving, to anyone who would listen, about his bizarre and tragic adventure with the avout who called himself Vit. Maybe I raised an eyebrow or something.

  “I’ve always wanted to meet an avout,” Malter said. “I think it would be an honor.”

  “Well,” I said, “you just met one.”

  * * *

  Vout: An avout. Derogatory term used extramuros. Associated with Saeculars who subscribe to iconographies that paint the avout in an extremely negative way.

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

  Mahsht was four times the size of the city around Saunt Edhar, and as such was the biggest city I’d yet been to in my peregrination—or my life, for that matter. To the great consternation of the regulars on this ship—the men who journeyed in transports like this one to and from the Arctic all the time—we were not given leave to enter the harbor and tie up at a pier as usual. Instead we had to stand off and keep station in the outer harbor. Word filtered down from the bridge that Mahsht had been thrown into disarray by the military convoys and that novel arrangements were being worked out from hour to hour.

  I spent much of that day abovedecks, just looking at the place, and enjoying being in a part of the world where the weather wasn’t trying to kill me. Even though Mahsht was farther north than Edhar, at fifty-seven degrees of latitude, its climate was moderate because of a river of warm water in the ocean. Having said that, it wasn’t warm, just dependably chilly. You could be comfortable if you wore a jacket and stayed dry. Staying dry could be a bit of a project.

  Mahsht was built around a fjord that forked into three arms. Each arm supported different kinds of facilities. One was military, and quite busy. One was commercial. It had been built around the end of the Praxic Age to handle cargo in steel boxes and hadn’t changed much since then. Normally our ship would have put in at a passenger terminal in that district. The third was the oldest. It had been built up out of stone and brick a thousand years before the Reconstitution, during the age when ships moved under power of wind and were unloaded by hand. Apparently there was still a demand for such facilities because smaller vessels went in and out of its stone docks all the time.

  The old town and the port facilities were built on filled tide flats, incised with networks of canals, narrow and irregular in Old Mahsht, gridded lanes in the commercial and military sectors. Much of the land that separated the arms of the fjord was too steep to build on. The spires and ridges of stone supported ancient castles, luxury casinos, and radar stations. The territory outside of town was steeper yet: a misty green-black wall with unrecognizable constructs scraped out of it, hanging at crazy angles a mile in the sky. Alwash explained to me that these were places where people paid to slide downhill on packed snow. It didn’t appeal to me at the moment.

  After a day, a tug came out and brought us to a wharf in Old Mahsht. According to the regulars, this had never happened before—they always went to the “new” commercial district. So, as much as I was absorbed in the workings of the tug and the shifting views of Old Mahsht’s warehouses, arks, cathedrals, and town center, I had now to give some thought to how I was going to find Cord, Sammann, Gnel, and Yul—or how I could help them find me. Should I walk to the commercial port on the assumption they’d be waiting for me there? Or would they have already heard about the disruptions in traffic and be looking for me in Old Mahsht?

  As soon as I came down the gangplank it was clear that Old Mahsht was the right place. Since the military part of town could not tolerate disarray and the commercial part found it unprofitable, all of the chaos had been pushed into the old town, which had become the kingdom of broken plans and improvisations. All of the city’s proper lodgings had been claimed by contractors from the south who were involved in this project of moving the military north, so people were sleeping in mobes and fetches, or on the streets. Against them, all doors were locked and many were guarded, so they were channeled into such open places as could be found, such as the tops of the wharves, unbuilt stretches of tide flat, and lots where ancient warehouses had been demolished to make room for new projects that had never been realized. This is what the gangplank spewed me into. I shuffled down the ramp scanning the crowd for my friends. The longer I sought their faces, the lower I was pushed on the ramp and the less I could see. Then I was down in it and could see nothing. Having no plan, I let the currents of the multitude stir me around. When I sensed still pockets or eddies in the flow I sidled into them and stood and looked about. From what I’ve described so far you might think it was a scene of terrible poverty, but the more I observed the more it was plain to me that there was work to be had here, that people had come to find it, and that what I was seeing—what I had become part of—was a kind of prosperity. Young men queued to talk to important fellows who I assumed were buyers of labor. Many others had come to sell goods or services to those who’d found work, so people were cooking food in carts or on open fires, hawking mysterious effects from the pockets of their coats, or behaving in very strange ways that, as I slowly realized, meant that they were willing to sell their bodies. Old
road-worn passenger coaches nudged through the crowds at slower than walking pace to discharge or take on passengers. The only wheeled transport that seemed to be of any practical use were pedal-powered cycles and motor scooters. Preachers of diverse arks commandeered pinch-points in the flow and shouted gospels and prophecies into crackling amps. There was a lot of uncollected garbage and open-air defecation, which made me glad it wasn’t warmer.

  The generous climate had long attracted immigrants, who came from all over the world, singly or in waves, and climbed up into fjords or mountain valleys to live as they pleased. Over time they developed their own modes of dress and even distinct racial characteristics. I bought food from a cart—it was easily the best food I’d had since my last supper at Saunt Edhar—and stood there eating it and watching the pageant. Long-haired mountain men, always alone. A huge family, moving in a tight formation, males in broad-brimmed hats, females in face-veils. A multi-racial group, all wearing red T-shirts, every head—men’s and women’s alike—shaved clean. A race, if that was the right word, of tall people with bony noses and prematurely white hair, hawking fresh shellfish packed in poly crates full of seaweed.

  After I’d been off the ship for an hour, it had become evident that meeting up with Cord, Sammann, and the Crades could easily take more than one day. I started considering where I might sleep that night—for I had at last reached a latitude where the sun went down for a few hours at this time of year. I knew that there were no great concents this far north. But in a city as old as this one there had to be at least one small math—perhaps even one dating to the Old Mathic Age. Wondering if I should try to seek one out and talk my way in, I walked up a broad street that ran from the waterfront up to the Bazian cathedral, scanning the fronts of old buildings for Mathic architecture or anything that looked like a cloister.

  Clamped to a black iron lamp post I noticed a speelycaptor, and this put me in mind of Sammann and his ability to obtain data from such devices. Perhaps I’d been going about this in the wrong way. It could be that Sammann was tracking me on speelycaptors but that my friends hadn’t been able to catch up with me because I kept moving around. So I decided to remain still for a while in a conspicuous place and see if that helped. I had just bumped into Malter and Alwash, who had given me the address of a Kelx mission hostel where I might be able to sleep in a pinch, and as long as I had such a backup plan I thought it might be worth the gamble to sit and wait somewhere. I chose a spot in the open plaza before the cathedral, in direct view of a speelycaptor bracketed to the front of Old Mahsht’s town hall.

  That’s where I got mugged.

  Or at least I thought it was a mugging at first. My attention had been drawn to a street performer doing gymnastics about fifty feet away. “Hey, Vit!” someone said, behind me on the right. I turned my face straight into an onrushing fist.

  While I was down, someone jerked my sweater up out of my trousers to bare my midsection. For some reason I thought of Lio, who’d been defeated at Apert when the slines had pulled his bolt over his head. So instead of protecting my face as I ought to have done I made a clumsy effort to push my sweater back down where it belonged. Someone’s hands were busy down there, jerking something out of the waistband of my trousers.

  It was my bolt, chord, and sphere. I’d made them up into a neat package and stuffed them into my trousers for safekeeping and covered them with the sweater.

  Ground level makes for a lousy vantage point. Especially when you’re on one side in a fetal position looking up out of the corner of one eye. But it seemed as though two men were playing tug-of-war with the package they’d stolen from me, trying to get it apart. The chord spiraled off and the bolt, which I’d pleated into a configuration called the Eight-fold Envelope, fell open. Out tumbled my pilled-up sphere. I caught it on the second bounce. A foot smashed down on my hand. “He’s trying to use it!” someone cried. A man dropped on me, one knee to either side. At this point a reflex took over. Lio had taught me that once I’d been mounted I’d never get up again, and so when I sensed what was happening I twisted sideways, getting my back up and my belly down, and drew my knees up under me, so that by the time this guy’s weight landed on me I was presenting my butt to him rather than my belly, and I had my legs under me where I could use them. My hand was still pinned to the ground by someone’s foot, but my sphere was trapped between my hand and the pavement. I made it bigger. The expanding sphere forced the man’s foot up, and when it became head-sized his foot rolled right off and my hand came free. I planted that hand under me and pushed as hard as I could with both arms and legs. The guy on top of me wrapped his arms around my trunk as I came up but I grabbed one of his pinkies in my fist and jerked it back. He screamed and let go. I surged forward without looking back. “He used a spell on me!” someone screamed. “The vout cast a spell on me!”

  Part of me—not the wiser part—wanted to explain to that guy what an idiot he was being, but most of me just wanted to put distance between myself and these mysterious attackers. How had they known I had been using the name Vit? I turned back to look at them. My passage through the crowd had left an open space in my wake. Several men were charging into it, coming for me. I’d never seen them before. There was something familiar in their faces, though: they belonged to the same ethnic group as Laro and Dag. Gheeths, as Brajj had called them.

  They were having trouble keeping up with me but I could not outrun their voices: “Stop him! Stop the vout!” This didn’t seem to have much effect. But then they got cleverer. “Murderer! Murderer! Stop him!” It turned out that this only made things easier for me since no one wanted to get in the way of a large, sprinting murderer. So then it became: “Thief! Thief! He stole an old lady’s money!” That was when the crowd closed in and people started sticking legs out to trip me.

  I jumped over a few of those, but it was obvious I had to get out of this crowded square, so I dodged into the first street I could reach that led away from it, then into an alley off that street. This was so narrow I could touch both sides, but at least I didn’t have the feeling any more of being engulfed in a huge and hostile mob.

  I heard the buzz of scooter engines. They were tracking me. Local scooter boys who knew the alley network were maneuvering to cut me off at the next intersection.

  I tried a few doors but they were locked. Then I made the mistake of doing so in view of an armed guard who was standing in front of a money-changing house a few doors up. He unslung a weapon and muttered something into his collar. I backtracked, took the next side-alley that I could find, and ran down it for a hundred yards to a place where it bridged a narrow canal. A couple of scooter boys pulled up to block the bridge just as I reached it. Glancing down I saw some mucky canal-bottom exposed. The tide must be out. I jumped down without thinking, landed and rolled in the soft mud, felt pain but didn’t break anything as far as I could tell. To one direction the canal curved back toward the town square. The other direction led to open sky: the waterfront. I began running that way, thinking that if I could get to the beach I might steal or beg a ride on a small boat. Even swimming would be safer than being in the middle of that crowd.

  But I couldn’t run very fast in the muck. And I was exhausted anyway. I’d forgotten to breathe. Bridges spanned the canal every couple of hundred feet, and I began to see people gathering on the bridges ahead of me, pointing at me excitedly.

  I turned around to see a bigger crowd on the bridge behind. They had bottles and stones ready. Trying to run under those bridges would be suicide. The canal wall was vertical but the stonework was ancient and rough-cut; I tried to scale it. Scooter noise zeroed in on me and something hit me on the top of the head.

  I woke up some time after landing in knee-deep water in the middle of the canal, and came up howling for air only to get hit by a dozen stones and bottles in as many seconds.

  “Stop! Stop! The vout isn’t going anywhere! Keep him penned in,” said some kind of self-appointed leader: a stout Gheeth with shaggy hair. “Our witn
ess is almost here!” he proclaimed.

  So we all waited for the “witness.” The crowd sorted itself. Most of them had been random people who had been drawn to the bridges or the canal-brink by simple curiosity or out of the belief that they were helping to collar a purse-snatcher. But those sorts drifted away or were pushed aside by new arrivals: Gheeths with jeejahs. So by the time that the witness arrived on the back of a pedal-powered cab, a minute or so later, a hundred percent of those staring down at me were Gheeths. And none of them believed that I was a purse-snatcher. What did they believe? I doubted most of them even cared.

  The witness was Laro. His leg was in a military-issue cast. “That is him! I’ll never forget his face. He used vout sorcery to save himself—but left our kinsman Dag for dead.”

  I looked at him like you have got to be kidding but the look on his face was so sincere it made me doubt my own version of the story.

  “The cops are coming!” someone warned. Actually, we’d been hearing such warnings the whole time I’d been at bay here. I wished those cops would hurry. But I wasn’t sure they’d treat me any better.

  “Let’s get this done!” someone shouted, and looked to the leader, who stepped to the brink. Sidling along next to him was a big guy holding a huge chunk of pavement above his head in both hands and staring at me intently.

  The leader pointed down at me. “He’s a vout. Laro testifies to it. These two found the evidence hidden under his clothes!”

  Two young Gheeths—the pair who’d mugged me—were pushed to the front of the crowd so vigorously they almost fell in. They had my bolt, chord, and sphere. At the leader’s prompting they raised these up for all to see. The crowd oohed and aahed at the exhibits as if they were nuclear bomb cores.