Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  “Yesterday we were Evoked,” said Fraa Osa. He was the first redshirt I had seen during the melee: the one who had covered me with his sphere and perched on it one-legged. He was probably in his fifth decade. “They said we should go to Tredegarh. We consulted a globe and determined that the most efficient route was via Mahsht.”

  The Ringing Vale was a hundred or so miles outside of Mahsht. From there a great circle route across the ocean would take one almost to Tredegarh, so this made sense as far as it went.

  “Local people gave us transportation to Mahsht. We found it as you found it. Those of us who speak Fluccish sought transport on a ship. We were approached by your magister.”

  “My magister!?” I shouted. Then I saw the faintest trace of irony on Osa’s face. He was half joking.

  But only half. “Sark,” he said. “He is well known to us. He comes to our Aperts, and speaks to us of his ideas.” Osa shrugged and made a gentle bobbling motion with his hands, which I thought was his way of telling me that they tried to weigh Sark’s preaching fairly. “In any case, he recognized us in the street. He told us that a lone avout was being pursued by a mob. We saw it as an emergence.”

  For a moment I thought he was slipping into broken Fluccish, trying to pronounce emergency. Then I remembered some of the Vale-lore that Lio had drummed into me over the years.

  During the time of the Reconstitution, literally in the Year 0, when the sites of the first new maths were being surveyed so that the cornerstones of their Clocks and Mynsters could be laid down, a team of freshly sworn-in avout had journeyed to a remote place in the desert to begin such a project, only to find themselves under siege by mistrustful locals. For the place they’d been sent was covered with jumpweed plantations and they had stumbled upon a shack where the weed was being boiled down to make a concentrated, illegal drug. The avout were unarmed. They had been pulled together from all over the world and so had little in common with one another; most of them didn’t even speak Orth. But it so happened that several of them were students of an ancient school of martial arts, which back in those days had no connection with the mathic world, even if it had been developed in monastic settings. Anyway, they had never used their skills outside of a gym, but they now found themselves thrust into a position where they had to take action. Some of their number were killed. Some of the martial artists performed well, others froze up and did no better than those who’d had no training at all. That sort of situation became known as an emergence. A few of the survivors went on to found the Ringing Vale math. According to Lio, they spent almost as much time thinking about the concept of emergence as they did in physical training—the idea being that all the training in the world was of no use, maybe even worse than useless, if you did not know when to use it, and knowing when to use it was a lot harder than it sounded, because sometimes, if you waited too long to go into action, it was too late, and other times, if you did it too early, you only made matters worse.

  “The most salient feature of the enemy was its thoughtless aggression,” Fraa Osa said. He reached into air and closed his hand as though grasping the wrist of an attacker who’d tried to punch him. It was an eloquent gesture, which was convenient for me, since Fraa Osa did not seem inclined to say more than that about the strategy they had used.

  “You reckoned, as long as they are in such a mood, let’s really give them something to be aggressive about,” I said, trying to draw him out a little more. Fraa Osa smiled and nodded. “So you grabbed that one person and started, uh…”

  Here for once I broke off instead of telling the truth, which was that they had been torturing that Gheeth. I didn’t want to seem critical towards these people who had just risked their lives saving mine. Fraa Osa just kept smiling and nodding. “It is a nerve pressure technique,” he said. “It seems to hurt a lot, but does no damage.”

  This raised all sorts of interesting questions: was there really a difference between hurting, and seeming to hurt? Was it permissible to torture someone if it didn’t cause clinical injuries? But again there were all sorts of reasons not to pursue such questions now. “Well, anyway, it worked,” I said. “The mob turned against you—you staged a false retreat and drew them into a trap—then you made them panic.” More smiling and nodding. Fraa Osa simply was in no mood to wax eloquent about any of this. “And how long did you have in which to devise this plan?” I asked him.

  “Not long enough.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “There is no time in an emergence to think up plans. Much less to communicate them. Instead I told the others that we would emulate Lord Frode’s cavalry at Second Rushy Flats, when they drew out Prince Terazyn’s squadron. Except that the canal edge would substitute for the Tall Canes and that little square would take the place of Bloody Breaks. As you can see it does not take very much time to say these words.”

  I nodded as if I had some idea what he was talking about—which I didn’t. I couldn’t even guess which war he was alluding to, in what millennium.

  “What’s with the red T-shirts?” I asked, though I already had my suspicions. Fraa Osa grinned ruefully. “They were issued to us at Voco,” he said. “Donated by a local ark. I look forward to reaching Tredegarh so that I can go back to the bolt and chord.”

  “Speaking of which—”

  He shook his head. “Your bolt, chord, and sphere are lost. Perhaps we could have gotten them back—but we departed in some haste.”

  “Of course!” I said. “Not a big deal.” And it wasn’t, in one sense. Fraas and suurs lost theirs from time to time. New ones were issued. But losing mine in this way made me feel pretty bad. They’d been with me for more than ten years and they had a lot of memories associated with them. They’d been my last physical link to the Mathic world. Now that they were gone, I could be any old Saecular. Which might be safer—no one could yank them out from concealment and wave them around and try to lynch me. But it made me feel lonely.

  Sammann went over and had a few words with Yul who jumped up, fetched the rifle, grabbed it by the barrel, and after a few running steps gave it a mighty heave. Spinning end-over-end it flew about halfway across the river, then stabbed into the current and disappeared. About a minute later, two mobes full of Mahsht constables showed up and piled out of their wailing and flashing vehicles. Except for Fraa Osa and the suur who was sewing me together, all of the Ringing Vale avout sat on the ground, feet tucked under them, and looked serene. The constables mostly gaped at them. How many thousands of speelies had been produced about the fictional exploits of the Valers? The cops couldn’t begin to think of them as suspects. They saw them more as tourist attractions. Zoo animals. Movie stars. What’s more, the Valers knew as much, and knew how to exploit it. They showed us the meaning of posture, and pretended to meditate. The cops ate it up. The boss cop had a long and (at first) tense conversation with Yul and Fraa Osa. The suur with the needle kept running that string through my flesh and I gritted my teeth so hard I could hear them creaking. Finally she tied it off and walked away without a word—without even a look. I had an upsight: I might have warm feelings for these people because they had helped me and because I had seen way too many speelies about them before I’d been Collected. The Valers, however, had not been Evoked because they were nice guys.

  Cord came over and stood with her hands in her pockets taking inventory of my bandages.

  “See what a small percentage of my body they actually cover,” I pointed out.

  She was having none of it.

  “Our plan didn’t work out so well,” I offered.

  She looked off to the side and sniffled—the last emotional aftershock of a long day. “Not your fault. How could we have known?”

  “I’m sorry to have put you through this. I don’t understand how things could have gone so wrong.”

  She looked at me acutely and saw nothing, I guess, except for a stupid look on my face. “You don’t have any idea what’s going on, do you?”

  “I guess not. Just
that the military has been moving toward the pole.” A memory popped into my head. “And a magister on the ship made some weird comment about the Warden of Heaven being cast out in wrath.”

  Even as I was saying this, an old rattletrap coach was pulling in off the road. At its controls was Magister Sark. It was one of those freakish coincidences that made some people believe in spirits and psychic phenomena. I explained it away by supposing that my unconscious mind had seen the coach out of the corner of my eye a few moments before I’d consciously recognized him.

  “You still with me?” Cord asked.

  “Yeah. Hey—what about Jesry? Is he okay?”

  “We think so. We’ll get you caught up.”

  We looked over at Yul, who had somehow managed to get the police captain laughing. Something had been decided between them. The official part of the conversation was over.

  The captain came over and made a few appreciative remarks about how banged up I was and what a tough guy I must be, then asked if I wanted to pursue it—to press charges. Absolutely lying through my teeth, I said no. By doing so, I apparently closed a deal. The particulars were never explained to me, but the gist of it was that all of us were free to go. The leaders of that mob would get off free except for injuries and insults already suffered. And these constables would dodge a mountain of paperwork: paperwork that would have been ten times as bad as what they were used to simply because many of those concerned were avout and hence of tricky legal status.

  Magister Sark had not been idle during all of these other goings-on. The coach belonged to his Kelx in Mahsht; it was painted all over with Triangle iconography. It was large enough to transport all of the Valers. Some other member of his Kelx had volunteered to drive them south to a bigger city, less chaotic than Mahsht at the moment, whence they could arrange transport to Tredegarh. This driver, he explained, was on his way, but because of the difficult conditions in town, we might have to wait for a little while.

  The magister glanced at me as he was explaining these things, and for some reason I felt a thrill of resentment. I did not like being indebted to him, and did not relish the prospect of having to sit gratefully through another sales pitch for his faith while we waited for the driver to show up. But it seemed he was more interested in checking my status than starting a conversation, and as soon as he stopped looking my way I felt ashamed of the way I’d reacted. Was there really that much of a difference between the Kelx notion of having one’s story related to the Magistrate, and the Valers’ concept of emergence? They seemed to produce very similar behavior; I owed my life to the fact that Sark and Osa had been of one mind, earlier today in Mahsht.

  I was on my feet by now; I limped over to him, held out my hand, and thanked him. He shook my hand firmly and said nothing.

  “The Condemned Man had a good yarn to spin for the Magistrate today,” I said. I guess I was trying to humor him.

  His face darkened. “But he could not tell it without speaking too of the ones who behaved evilly. Yes, it is the case that—thanks to the spirit of the Innocent—some good was achieved. But I can scarcely believe that the Magistrate’s ultimate judgment of this world was much shifted, either way, by what he heard from the Condemned Man today.”

  Not for the first time I was astonished by Magister Sark’s ability to be intelligent and wise while spouting prehistoric nonsense. “For your own part, anyway,” I pointed out, “it seems you chose in a way that reflects well on you and your world.”

  “The Innocent moved me,” he insisted. “Give all credit to her.”

  “I give you my personal thanks,” I said, “and ask you to relay it to the Innocent the next time you hear from her.”

  He shook his head in exasperation, then finally chuckled; though such a grim fellow was he that his chuckle was something between a gag and a cough. “You don’t understand at all.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. “I am in no shape for Dialog right now, but perhaps some other time I can try to explain to you how I see all of these matters.”

  His reaction was noncommittal, but he understood that the conversation was over. He wandered away. I collected some blank paper from Yul’s fetch and began to scribble out notes to my friends at the Convox. Magister Sark got into a long conversation with Yul and Cord, interrupted from time to time by Ganelial Crade, who of course belonged to a completely different faith, and who paced back and forth at a distance, fuming, then darted in from time to time to dispute some fine point of deology.

  A mobe swung through, dropped off the driver who would take the Valers south, and picked up Magister Sark. The Valers began to find seats aboard the coach. Fraa Osa was the last to board. I handed him a stack of notes. “For my friends at Tredegarh,” I explained, “if you would not mind bearing them.”

  He bowed.

  “You’ve already done me plenty of favors, so it is okay to say no,” I went on.

  “You did us a favor,” he countered, “by creating an emergence nested within the larger emergence, and giving us an opportunity to train.”

  I said nothing. I was wondering what he meant by “the larger emergence,” and reckoned he must be talking about the Cousins. He was sifting through the letters I’d given him. “You have many friends at the Convox!” he remarked, and looked up at me quizzically. This was probably an indirect way of asking what the heck are you doing!? but I ignored it. “The long one, there, is for a girl named Ala. The others are for some other fraas and suurs of mine—”

  “Aah!” exclaimed Fraa Osa, holding one up. “You know the famous Jesry!”

  I didn’t even want to think about what was implied by Jesry’s being famous, so I glided past it and directed his attention to the last letter in the stack. “Lio,” I said, “Fraa Lio is a student of Vale-lore.”

  “Ah!” he exclaimed. As if Lio were unique; as if the world, for thousands of years, at any given moment, had not contained millions of vlor students.

  “Mostly self-taught. But it is important to him. If this letter were handed to him by even the most junior member of the Ringing Vale math, it would be the greatest honor of his life. Uh, don’t tell him I said that.”

  Fraa Osa bowed again. “I shall comply with all of your instructions.” He put his foot on the coach’s running board. “Here I say farewell—unless—?” And he looked between me and the coach.

  I fell for it hard. I imagined the long ride on the coach full of authentic Ringing Vale avout, maybe a night or two in a room at a casino down south, a journey—safe and well-organized—to Tredegarh, reunion with my friends there. If these people could somehow get their hands on a plane, it could even happen in a day. I imagined all of that long and hard enough to savor it, to look forward to it.

  But I knew it was all a daydream. That I had to pull back. That the longer I kept on this way the harder it was going to be.

  “I want to climb on board that thing and go to Tredegarh with you like that water wants to find the ocean,” I said, gesturing to the river. “But to quit in the middle”—just because I’m beat up and homesick and scared—“seems wrong. Fraa Jad—he’s the Millenarian who sent me—would never understand.”

  This was the first thing that had happened all day that startled Fraa Osa. “A Thousander,” he repeated.

  “Yes.”

  “Then you had best finish the task.”

  “That’s kind of what I’m thinking.”

  He bowed one more time—more deeply than before. Then he turned his back on me and climbed into the coach. I went to the latrine and peed blood and boarded Yul’s fetch. Sammann was in there too. We pulled on to the main road and turned south. I slept.

  They said I only slept for half an hour but it felt much longer. When I woke up I crawled into the back of the fetch, where it was darker, and Sammann showed me a speely on his jeejah.

  Sammann was the only member of the crew who didn’t make remarks or ask questions about my injuries and emotional state. This might make it sound like he was insensitive. Frankly, th
ough, I could have done with a lot less sensitivity by that point in the day.

  “There is not a lot of explanatory content connected to this data because of the way in which it was obtained,” he warned as he was queueing it up.

  The image quality was, as usual, terrible. It took me a minute even to be sure that it had been shot in color. Everything was either solid black (space, and shadows) or blinding white (anything with sun shining on it). As I slowly came to realize, it had been made by aiming a hand-held speelycaptor out a dirty window. “Outgassing,” Sammann said, which meant little to me. He went on to explain that the materials used to build the space capsule had, in the vacuum of space, let go of vaporous byproducts that had congealed on the spacecraft windows. “You’d think they would have solved that problem,” I said. “They built it in a rush,” he answered.

  A perfect circle, centered in a perfect equilateral triangle, dominated the view. “It’s the back end of the alien ship,” Sammann explained. “The pusher plate on the rear. They always kept it oriented toward the capsule—think about it.”

  After a few moments I tried: “They—the Cousins—couldn’t be sure that our space capsule wasn’t carrying a nuclear warhead. So they kept the nuke-proof part of their ship aimed towards it.”

  “That’s part of it,” Sammann said, and gave me a wicked grin—egging me on.

  “They could spit one of their own nukes out the back of that thing and blow up the space capsule any time they felt like it.”