Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  Late on the fourth day we came over a little rise and beheld in the distance a naked mountain. Mountains for me had always borne dark green pelts, shaggy with mist. But this one looked as though acid had been poured on it and burned off everything alive. It had the same structure of ridges and cols as the mountains I was used to but it was as bald as the head of a Ringing Vale avout. The pink-orange light of the setting sun made it glow like flesh in candlelight. I was so taken by its appearance that I stared at it for quite a while before I realized that there was nothing behind it. A few more such mountains rose beyond it in the distance, but they rose from a flat and featureless geometric plane, dark grey: an ocean.

  That night we camped on a beach beside the Sea of Seas. The next morning we drove the vehicles down a ramp onto the ferry that took us to the Island of Ecba.

  * * *

  Semantic Faculties: Factions within the mathic world, in the years following the Reconstitution, generally claiming descent from Halikaarn. So named because they believed that symbols could bear actual semantic content. The idea is traceable to Protas and to Hylaea before him. Compare Syntactic Faculties.

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

  The light through the tent-cloth roused, the surf on the beach lulled, and like a log rolling up and down in the breakers I’d rocked any number of times between sleeping and waking as I nursed a vague and uneventful dream about the Geometers. Some part of my mind had become obsessed with the remote manipulator arms on the probe that they had sent out to fetch the Warden of Heaven, and had been consuming vast dark energies dwelling on them, sharpening and embellishing my memories, building them up into a hybrid of seen and imagined, theorics and art, that encoded all sorts of weird ideas and fears and hopes. I fended off wakefulness as long as I could, since that would lose me the dream, and I lay there half-conscious, waiting for something to happen, willing the dream to move ahead, to reveal something; but I only grew more restless, for nothing occurred but what sprang from my own thinking: endlessly deeper study of the joints, bones, bearings, and actuators of those arms, which in my imagination had become as complex as my own arms and hands, and styled with the same organic curves as the parts of our clock that Cord used to make for Sammann. The only new thing that developed in that dreaming was that, at the very end, I turned my attention from the arms to the imaging devices that I guessed must be present on the bodies of those probes. But those lenses—supposing they were there—were guarded by clusters of spotlights, and when I tried to stare into them and meet the Geometers’ gaze, all I could see was explosions of glare held apart by utter blackness.

  Frustration succeeded in waking me up where daylight, the smell of cooking food, and the others’ conversation had failed. I could not move matters forward save by waking up and doing something.

  Ecba was beautiful, in a hot and harsh way. It had taken us a day simply to erect defenses against sun and heat. We’d found an east-facing cove north of a precipitous rocky headland that afforded us shade for much of the day, and Yul had showed us ways to anchor stakes deep in the sand, which enabled us to put up tarps that blocked the late afternoon sun. The only time we really got blasted with it was first thing in the morning, before the heat got too bad. A smaller island half a mile offshore broke and diffracted incoming surf, so waves here were small but unpredictable. The cove was too shallow and rock-bound to be of use to any but the smallest boats, so it had never, as far as we could tell, been settled or used for anything. We kept expecting someone to rush up, gaudy with insignias, and eject us, but it didn’t happen. The place did not seem to be private property. It was not a park. It was simply there. Ecba’s only real settlement (other than the math at Orithena) enveloped the ferry terminal, five miles away in a straight line, fifteen by the road that traversed the island’s shore. A desalination plant, powered by the sun, made and sold water there. Yul had filled a couple of musty-smelling military surplus water bladders when we had arrived. Between that and the food we’d bought from farmers on the mainland, we wouldn’t really have to make another supply run for a week.

  The day after we’d made the camp and pitched the tarps had been, by unspoken, unanimous agreement, a time to rest. Beat-up books had appeared from bottoms of bags. Someone was always snoring, someone always swimming. I borrowed a pair of long-nosed pliers from Cord and yanked my stitches out, then sat in the surf up to my neck until the wounds went numb. There is more I could, but won’t, say about healing. Watching my body marshal its forces of regeneration was fascinating at the time, and probably accounted for the weird dreams I had been having about the metallic limbs and crystal organs of the alien probe. There was the temptation to ponder and philosophize about the relationship between mind and body. But the Lorite in me said it would be a waste of time. More efficient to find a library and read what better thinkers had written on it.

  Late yesterday, Yul had shattered the calm of the place by starting the engine of Cord’s fetch, and some of us had gone for a dawdling, two-hour circumnavigation of the island. The location of the volcano was, of course, no secret; there was hardly a place from which it couldn’t be seen. It was steep, which, as Fraa Haligastreme had taught me, meant that it was dangerous. Some volcanoes produced runny lava that spread out quickly; these were lens-shaped and safe, provided you could walk faster than the lava. Others made thick lava that moved slowly and built steep slopes; these were dangerous because pent-up pressure had no outlet except for explosions.

  This island was the last stop on a ferry route that ran generally south-southeast from the mainland, so we’d steamed into it from the north. The terminal and town were built around the island’s only surviving harbor, a bite chomped out of the northwest limb of the approximately round island. Our camp was in the northeast, in one of a series of closely spaced coves separated by fingers of hardened magma that had reached down from the caldera many centuries before Ecba had been settled. So all of our views, during those first few days, had been of the north face of the volcano, which looked regular and graceful—even if Haligastreme’s voice was in my ear telling me it was dangerously steep. Yesterday’s drive had taken us clockwise around the island, passing down its eastern shore, and after a few miles we had suddenly come in view of its south slope, which had exploded and collapsed in-2621, burying the Temple of Orithena, and filling in and obliterating a harbor on the island’s southeastern coast into which the early physiologers—followers of Cnoüs from all round the Sea of Seas—had once voyaged in their galleys and sailing-ships. Anyone could see at a glance that it was the result of an explosion. The ash and rubble sloped straight from summit to sea. So slow had Ecba been to recover that the road, even now, faltered as it came up on to the rubble-fan, and became an informal dirt track for several miles. There were no signs, no buildings or improvements. At one point, though, as we had slowly rounded the island’s southeastern curve, and had come to a place where we could look straight up into the yawning rupture in the volcano’s cone, we had seen a separate track, teed into the coastal road, that ran straight uphill for some distance, then veered off into the first of a series of switchbacks. These ascended a bare slope whose skyline was reinforced by a dark wall. We hadn’t needed Sammann’s satellite imagery to know that this was the math that had been a-building there since 3000.

  Halfway between us and it, at the beginning of the switchbacks, a few low buildings struggled to keep their roofs above the drifting ash. We had gone up there and found several avout running a sort of checkpoint and souvenir stand. They had all worn bolts and chords openly. We had told them no lies, but behaved as if we were tourists. They had been pleased to sell us things (soap made with volcanic ash) but had let us know we could not drive any farther up the road.

  Later, as we had paused in town to pick up supplies, I had again seen bolted and chorded avout walking around openly. They had not seemed like hierarchs. This had been, then, a violation of the Discipline—as was letting avout run a souvenir stand. But too it let us know tha
t relations between avout and extras were much friendlier here than, say, in Mahsht. I had badly wanted to approach those avout and ask them if they knew of Orolo, but had checked myself, reasoning that they would still be here tomorrow, and it was better to sleep on it. And sleep on it I had, but this had booted me nothing but that endless, frustrating dream about remote manipulator arms.

  Having slept so poorly, I didn’t say much at breakfast until I came out with: “Suppose there are no biological Geometers—creatures with bodies like ours, sitting at the controls of those machines. What if they died long ago and left behind ships and probes that run an automated program?”

  This turned out to be an absolute conversation-killer except in the case of Sammann, who seemed delighted by the idea. “So much the better for us,” he said, which puzzled me for a moment until I perceived that by us he meant the Ita.

  I considered it. “Makes you more useful to the Saecular Power, you mean.”

  His face froze for a while and I knew I’d offended him. “Perhaps being useful to them isn’t the only thing we care about,” he suggested. “Perhaps the Ita can have other aspirations.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Think what a fascinating problem it would be, to interact with such a system!” he exclaimed. I had gotten off easy. He was so thrilled by this idea that he wasn’t going to dwell on my slur. “At its lowest level, it would be a fully deterministic syndev. But it would express itself only in certain actions: movements of the ship, transmissions of data, and so on. Observables.”

  “We’d use givens, but go on.”

  “To grasp the workings of the syntactic program by analyzing those givens would be a sort of code-breaking effort. We Ita would have to have our own Convox.”

  “You could solve the Aboutness Problem once and for all,” I suggested, half serious.

  He lowered his gaze from enraptured study of the sky and stared at me. “You’ve studied the AP?”

  I shrugged. “Probably not as much as you have. We learn about it when we study the early history of the Split.”

  “Between the followers of Saunt Proc and the disciples of Saunt Halikaarn.”

  “Yeah. Though it’s a little unfair to call one group followers and the other disciples, if you see what I mean. Anyway, that’s what we call the Split.”

  “Procians were more friendly to the syntactic point of view…or maybe I should have said Faanians…”

  Sammann seemed a little shaky here, so I reminded him: “We’re speaking, remember, of Aboutness. You and I can think about things. Symbols in our brains have meanings. The question is, can a syntactic device think about things, or merely process digits that have no Aboutness—no meaning—”

  “No semantic content,” Sammann said.

  “Yes. Now, at the Concent of Saunt Muncoster, just after the Reconstitution, Faan was the FAE of the Syntactic Faculty—followers of Proc. She took the view that Aboutness didn’t exist—was an illusion that any sufficiently advanced syndev creates for itself. By this time Evenedric was already dead but he like Halikaarn before him had taken the view that our minds could do things that syndevs couldn’t—that Aboutness was real—”

  “That our thoughts really did have semantic content over and above the ones and zeroes.”

  “Yes. It’s related to the notion that our minds are capable of perceiving ideal forms in the Hylaean Theoric World.”

  “Would you people mind!?” Yul bellowed. “We’re trying to have a campout here!”

  “This is what we do to relax,” Sammann shot back.

  “Yeah,” I said, “if we were working, we’d talk about things that were tedious and complicated.”

  “It’s worse than listening to preachers!” Yul complained, but Gnel refused to rise to the bait.

  “Let me explain it in words you can understand, cousin,” Gnel said. “If the aliens are just a big computer program, Sammann here can shut them down just by flipping one bit. The program won’t even know it’s being sabotaged.”

  “Only if it does not have Aboutness,” I cautioned him. “If it’s capable of understanding that its symbols are about something, then it’ll know that Sammann is up to no good.”

  “It would have to have crazy security measures built in,” Yul said, “what with all those nukes and so on.”

  “If it lacks Aboutness, it is incredibly vulnerable, so yes,” Sammann said. “But systems with true Aboutness, or so the myth goes, should be much more difficult to deceive.”

  “Nah,” Yul said, and looked at his cousin again. “You just have to deceive ’em in a different way.”

  “Apparently the Warden of Heaven was not very convincing,” Gnel pointed out, “so maybe preaching isn’t as easy as you think.”

  Cord cleared her throat and frowned at her bowl. “Uh, not that this isn’t fascinating, but what is the plan for today?”

  This produced a long silence. Cord followed up with, “I like it here, but it’s beginning to feel creepy. Does anyone else think it’s creepy?”

  “You’re talking to a bunch of guys,” Yul said. “No one here is going to validate your feelings.” She tossed sand at him.

  “I’ve been doing some research,” Sammann said, “which was creepy in itself, because I didn’t understand why I should have such good Reticulum access in such a godforsaken place…”

  “But you understand it now?” Gnel asked.

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “What did you learn?”

  “The whole island is a single parcel, owned by a single entity. Has been since the Old Mathic Age. Back in those days it was a petty principality. Got kicked back and forth between different empires from age to age. When kings and princes went out of style it would pass into the hands of a private owner or a trust. When they came back into fashion, it’d get a prince or a baron or something again. But nine hundred years ago it was purchased by a private foundation—that’s a thing like a Dowment. And they must have had ties to the mathic world—”

  “Because the Orithena dig—the new concent we saw yesterday—was sponsored by them?”

  “Sponsored, or something,” Sammann said.

  “A single Apert—ten days—isn’t long enough to organize such a big project,” I pointed out. “This Dowment must have been a long time making its plans.”

  “It’s not so hard,” Cord said. “The Unarians have Apert once a year. It’s easy to talk to them. Some graduate and become Tenners. Some of those become Hundreders, and so on. If these guys started working on it in 2800, by the time of the Millennial Convox of 3000 they could have had supporters everywhere except in Thousander maths.”

  I was uneasy with Cord’s scenario because it sounded sneaky, but I couldn’t dispute the facts she’d stated. I guess what troubled me about it was that we, the avout, liked to believe that we were the only long-term thinkers, the only ones capable of hatching plans over centuries, and her scenario envisioned a Dowment in the Saecular world turning the tables on us.

  Perhaps Sammann was harboring similar feelings. “It could just as well have worked the other direction,” he said.

  “What—” I exclaimed, “are you saying that a bunch of avout created a Dowment in the Saecular world to buy them an island? That’s outrageous.”

  But we all knew Sammann had won that exchange, because he was relaxed, satisfied. I was angry and off balance. Largely because this all fit so neatly into what I had been told, in recent weeks, about the Lineage.

  Still, everyone seemed to be looking at me for a response. “If it’s like you say, Sammann, then they—whoever they are—know we’re here anyway. I think we should take the direct approach. Drive down there. I’ll just walk up to the gate, knock, and state my business.”

  That got all of us on our feet, getting ready for the day, except for Gnel who just followed Sammann around. “There must be more information about what sort of entity bought the island. I mean, come on! How many things last nine hundred years in this world?”

  “Lots of
things,” Sammann said. “As an example, that ark you belong to has lasted quite a bit longer…” He turned and searched Gnel’s face. “That’s your point, isn’t it? You think this is some kind of religious institution?”

  Gnel was a little taken aback, and seemed to back down. “I’m just saying, businesses don’t last that long.”

  “But it’s quite a stretch to go from that to saying that Ecba is run by a secret ark.”

  “When I see avout walking openly in the streets of the town,” Gnel said, “it tells me we need to ‘stretch’ beyond normal explanations.”

  “We saw avout in the streets of Mahsht. Maybe the ones here just got Evoked or something,” said Yul, getting into the act.

  I don’t think that this seemed plausible to any of us—Yul included—but it brought us to an impasse. “Many avout,” I said, “especially Procian/Faanian ones, think that belief in the Hylaean Theoric World is basically a religion anyway. And I have reason to believe that the avout down there at Orithena are the ultimate fringe of HTW believers. So whether it’s a religious community or not sort of depends on how you define your terms.” I faltered as I said that last bit, just imagining how Orolo would plane me if he heard me talking Sphenic gibberish. Even Sammann turned to fix me with an incredulous look. But he didn’t say anything, because I think he understood that I was just trying to get us moving. “Look,” I said to Gnel, “Sammann’s investigation just got started, and we’ve seen before that it can sometimes take a few days for him to get access to certain things. Whether or not they open the gates for me at Orithena, you’ll have plenty of time to ask around and learn more in days to come.”