Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  So we had stalled them for a few minutes. But everyone felt desperately short of time now. Suddenly a dozen ladders were available—all different sizes, all hand-crafted of wood. The Orithenans began lashing them together to make a scaffold right next to the probe, on the side that seemed to have a sort of hatch. Cord clambered up and found a place to stand on a ladder that had been placed horizontally. I felt proud watching her. So much about this might have been overwhelming. At some level perhaps she was overwhelmed. But this probe was, after all, a machine. She could tell how it worked. And as long as she held her focus on that, none of the other stuff mattered.

  “Talk to us!” Sammann called to her, staring at the screen of his jeejah as he lined up his shot.

  “There is clearly a removable hatch,” she said. “It is trapezoidal with rounded corners. Two feet wide at the base. One and a half at the top. Four high. Curved like the fuselage.” She was doing a funny kind of dance, because the scaffold was still being improvised beneath her—she was poised between two ladder-rungs and the ladder kept shifting. She was casting an array of lapping shadows on what she wanted to see, so she fished a headlamp out of her vest, turned it on, and played its beam over the streaked and burned surface of the probe.

  “Can we just go ahead and call it a door?” Sammann asked.

  “Okay. There is Geometer-writing stenciled around the door. Letters about an inch high.”

  “Stenciled?” Sammann asked.

  “Yeah.” Cord stretched the band of the lamp over her head and adjusted its angle, freeing her hands.

  “Literally stenciled?”

  “Yeah. In the sense that they took a piece of paper with letter-shaped cutouts and held it up to the metal and slapped paint on it.” I heard a series of metallic raps. Cord was touching a magnet to various places around the door. “None of this is ferrous.” Then a screeching noise. “I can’t scratch it with my steel knife blade. Maybe a high-temp stainless alloy.”

  “Fascinating,” Orolo called. “Can you get it open?”

  “I think that the stenciled messages are opening instructions,” she said. “It is the same message—the same stencil—repeated in four places around the door. In each case, there is a line painted from it—”

  “An arrow?” someone called. Others, who were standing where they could see it better, were more certain. “Those are arrows!”

  “They don’t look like our arrows,” Cord said, “but maybe the Geometers do them differently. Each of them is aimed at a panel about the size of my hand. These panels appear to be held in place with fasteners—flush-head machine bolts—four per panel—I don’t have the right tool to put into them but I can fake it with a daisy-head driver.” She frisked herself.

  “How do we know they are fasteners at all?” someone called. “We know nothing of these aliens and their praxis!”

  “It’s just obvious!” Cord called back. “I can see little burrs where some alien mechanic over-torqued them. The heads are knurled so aliens can turn ’em with their alien fingers when they are loose. The only question is: clockwise, or counterclockwise?”

  She jammed a driver into place, whacked it once with the heel of her hand to seat it, and grunted as she applied torque. “Counterclockwise,” she announced. For some reason this caused a cheer to run through the crowd of avout. “The Geometers are right-handed!” someone called, and everyone laughed.

  Cord pocketed the bolts as she got them out. The little panel fell off and clattered through the scaffolding to the stone plaza, where someone snatched it up and peered at it like a page from a holy book. “Behind the panel is a cavity containing a T-handle,” she announced. “But I’m going to remove the other three panels before I mess with it.”

  “Why?” someone asked—typical argumentative avout, I thought.

  Going to work on another panel, Cord answered patiently: “It’s like when you bolt the wheel onto your mobe, you take turns tightening the nuts to equalize the stress.”

  “What if there is a pressure differential?” Orolo asked.

  “Another good reason to take it slow,” Cord muttered. “We don’t want anyone to get smashed by a flying door. As a matter of fact—” She looked out at the crowd of avout below.

  Yul took her meaning. He cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed: “MOVE BACK! Everyone get clear of the hatch. A hundred feet away. MOVE!” The voice was shockingly loud and authoritative. People moved, and opened up a corridor all the way to Gnel’s fetch.

  More aerocraft, of two or three different types, approached while Cord was undoing the panels. We could hear them landing on the other side of the wall. Someone called down news that soldiers were getting out, down on the road by the souvenir shop.

  A thought occurred to me. “Sammann,” I asked, “are you sending this out over the Reticulum?”

  “Smile,” Sammann answered, “right now a billion people are laughing at you.”

  I tried not to think about the soldiers and the billion people.

  A hiss came from the probe. Cord jumped back and almost toppled from the scaffold. The hiss died away asymptotically over a few seconds. Cord laughed nervously. “One of the things that happens when you operate a T-handle,” she said, “is that a pressure-equalizing valve opens up.”

  “Did air go in, or out?” Orolo asked.

  “In.” Cord operated the other three T-handles. “Uh-oh,” she said, “here it comes!” And the door simply fell out and hit the ladder she was standing on. Yul got his arms up in time to steer it down to the ground. We all watched that. Then all looked to Cord, who was standing there, hands on hips, pelvis cocked to one side, aiming the beam of her headlamp into the probe.

  “What’s in there?” someone finally asked.

  “A dead girl,” she said, “with a box on her lap.”

  “Human or—”

  “Close,” Cord said, “but not from Arbre.”

  Cord crouched as if to enter the capsule, but then started as the scaffolding torqued, rocked, and rebounded. It was Yul. He had vaulted up to join her. He wasn’t about to let his girl climb into an alien spaceship until he’d checked it for monsters. The scaffold had been about right for one, and had now reached maximum capacity; no one else was going up there as long as most of the space was claimed by an agitated Yulassetar Crade. Cord was mildly offended; she refused to move, so Yul had to drop to his knees and stick his head into the doorway down around the level of her thighs. It felt haphazard, hasty, and absolutely the wrong way to treat such priceless theorical evidence. If circumstances had been different, avout would have swarmed the ladders and restrained Yul, nothing would have been touched until all had been measured, phototyped, examined, analyzed. But the hovering and circling aerocraft, as well as other sound effects from above, had put everyone in a different frame of mind. “Yul!” Sammann shouted, and as soon as Yul turned around the Ita lobbed his jeejah up to the scaffold. Yul reached instinctively, snatched it out of the air, and thrust it into the capsule. It could see in the dark better than a human and so he ended up using its screen as a night vision device. That’s how he noticed the dark stains in the clothing of the dead Geometer.

  “She’s wounded,” he announced, “she’s bleeding!” There were cries of alarm from some of the avout who assumed Yul must be talking of Cord, but soon it was clear that he was speaking of the Geometer in the capsule.

  “Are you claiming he, she, is alive!?” Sammann asked.

  “I don’t know!” Yul said, turning his head to look down at us.

  As long as he was out of the way, Cord thrust a leg into the doorway and leaned her head and upper body through. We heard a muffled exclamation. Yul relayed it: “Cord says she’s still warm!”

  All kinds of theorical questions were coming up in my mind—and probably the minds of all the others: how can you tell it’s female? How do you know they even have sexes? What makes you think they have blood like we do, and that that’s what is coming out of her? But, again, the stress and chaos releg
ated all such questions to a kind of intellectual quarantine.

  Orolo pointed out, “If there is any possibility that she might be alive, we must do whatever we can to help her!”

  That was all Yul needed to hear. He tossed the jeejah back to Sammann with one hand while giving Cord a knife with the other. “She’s strapped in pretty good,” he warned us. All we could see of Cord now was one leg, which twisted and pawed as she braced it against the scaffold. A minute passed. We stood, waiting, unable to help Cord, helpless to do anything about the banging, booming, and metallic screeching noises resounding from the gates and walls of the concent high above. Finally Cord gave a great heave and tumbled half out of the door. Yul reached in for the second heave. Like a rafting guide hauling a drowned customer from a river, he brought the Geometer out with the full power of both arms and legs, and ended up lying on his back with the alien sprawled full-length on top of him. Red liquid spilled down around his ribs and dripped through the rungs onto the ground. Twenty hands reached up to accept the weight of the Geometer as Yul rolled her sideways off his body. Three hands, one of them Orolo’s, converged on her head, cradling it, taking great care it did not loll. I glimpsed the face. From fifty feet, anyone would have taken her for a native of this planet. Close up, there was no doubt that she was, as Cord had put it, “not from Arbre.” There was no one thing about her face that would prove this. But the color and texture of her skin and hair, the bone structure, the sculpture of the outer ear, the shape of the teeth, were all just different enough.

  It was out of the question to lay her down on the rocket-blasted ground, still hot and strewn with jagged tile-shards, so we looked around for the nearest flat surface that might serve. This turned out to be the empty bed of Gnel’s fetch, about a hundred feet away. We carried the Geometer on our shoulders, quick-stepping as fast as we could without dropping her. Suur Maltha, the concent’s physician, met us halfway and was probing the patient’s neck with her fingertips before we had even set her down. Gnel, thinking fast, got a camp pad rolled out just in time. We laid the Geometer down on it, head on the tailgate. She was in a loose, pale blue coverall, the back sodden with what was obviously blood. Suur Maltha ripped the garment open and explored the body with a stethoscope. “Even allowing for the fact that I can’t be sure where the heart is, I hear no pulse. Just some very faint noises that I would identify as bowel sounds. Roll her over.”

  We got the Geometer on her stomach. Suur Maltha cut the fabric away. It was not just soaked with blood but perforated with many holes. Maltha used a cloth to swipe a mess of gore away from the back, revealing a constellation of large round puncture wounds, extending from the buttocks up halfway to the shoulder, mostly on the left side. Everyone inhaled and became silent. Suur Maltha regarded it for a few moments, mastering her own sense of shock, and then looked as if she might be about to deliver some clinical observation.

  But Gnel beat her to it. “Shotgun blast,” he diagnosed. “Heavy gauge—antipersonnel. Medium range.” And then, though it wasn’t really necessary, he delivered the verdict: “Some SOB shot this poor lady in the back. May God have mercy on her soul.”

  One of Maltha’s assistants had had the presence of mind to shove a thermometer into an orifice that she had noticed down where the legs joined. “Body temp similar to ours,” she announced. “She has been dead for maybe minutes.”

  The sky fell on us. Or so it seemed, for a few moments. Someone above had cut the shroud lines of the parachute and it had collapsed on our heads. Startling as all hell, but harmless. Everyone spread out and got busy pawing, dragging, stuffing, and wadding. There was no coherent plan. But eventually a lot of avout came together in the middle of the plaza, corralling a huge wad of chute-stuff which they pushed and rolled up the steps of the Temple to get it out of the way. When it was obvious that there was an oversupply of these chute-wranglers, I turned back towards the probe, meaning to go and give the people there an update. My inclination was to run. But soldiers in head-to-toe suits were coming down the ramp in force and I thought that running might only excite someone’s chase instinct.

  Orolo and Sammann were examining an artifact that had been in the capsule—the box that Cord had seen on the occupant’s lap. It was made of some fibrous stuff, and it contained four transparent tubes filled with red liquid. Blood samples, we figured. Each was labeled with a different, single word in Geometer-writing, and a different circular ikon: a picture of a planet—not Arbre—as seen from space.

  Soldiers yanked it out of our hands. They were all around us now. Each sported a bandolier loaded with what looked like oversized bracelets. Whenever they encountered an avout they’d yank one off and ratchet it around the avout’s throat, whereupon it would come alive and flash a few times a second. Each collar had a different string of digits printed on its front, so once they’d captured a picture of you, they would know your face and your number. It didn’t require a whole lot of imagination to guess that the collars had tracking and surveillance capabilities. But as sinister and dehumanizing as all of this was, nothing came of it, at least for now—it seemed that they only wanted to know who was where.

  Fraa Landasher acquitted himself well, demanding—firmly but calmly—to know who was in charge, by what authority this was being done (“What law covers alien probes, by the way?”) and so on. But the soldiers were all dressed in suits made for chemical and biological warfare, which didn’t make engaging them in dialog any easier, and Landasher didn’t know enough about the legal procedures of this time and place. He could have mounted a fine legal defense 6400 years ago but not today.

  A contingent of four soldiers, distinguished by special insignias that had been hastily poly-taped onto their suits, approached the probe and started to unpack equipment. Two of them climbed up on the scaffold, shooed away the fraa who was inside of it, and began collecting samples and making phototypes of their own.

  The soldiers had naturally come to the probe first. They communicated well with one another because their suits had wireless intercoms, but they couldn’t hear or talk to us very fluently. When they did talk to us, it was to boss us around, and when they listened, it was with something worse than skepticism—as if their officers had issued a warning that the avout would try to cast spells on them. The ones who entered the probe might have noted some red fluid, but it wasn’t as obvious as you might think—the capsule had very little uncluttered floor space, the lighting was poor, and the acceleration couches were upholstered in dark material that didn’t show the stain. The face shields on the soldiers’ helmets kept fogging up. Their gloved hands could not feel the sticky wetness, their air-filtration devices removed all odors. Standing near the probe, getting used to the collar snugged around my neck, I realized that a long time might actually go by before any of the soldiers became aware of the fact that a Geometer had come down in this capsule and was lying dead in the back of a fetch a hundred feet away. The billion people watching Sammann’s feed over the Reticulum all knew this. The soldiers, isolated in their own secure, private reticule, had no idea. Sammann, Orolo, Cord, and I kept exchanging amazed and amused looks as we collectively realized this.

  Yul distracted everyone for a while. He shoved away the soldiers who came to collar him, then, when they aimed weapons at him, negotiated a deal that he would collar himself. But once he’d put it on and the soldiers had walked away, he pulled the collar right off over his head. He had a thick neck and a small skull. The collar scraped his scalp and lacerated his ears, but he got it off. Then, having satisfied himself that he could do it, he pulled it back on again.

  An officer finally noticed the small crowd of uncollared avout gathered around Gnel’s fetch, and sent a squad over to take care of them. It seemed that we were free to move about as long as we didn’t try to run away or interfere with the soldiers, so I followed them at a distance that I hoped they would consider polite.

  Collared avout were being herded toward the Temple steps. Nearby, a line of soldiers was moving acros
s the Teglon plaza, bent forward at the waist, picking up stray tiles and other debris that might go ballistic when they began landing things there. Big vertical-landing aerocraft were keeping station in the sky above, waiting for the landing zone to be prepared. I reckoned that the general plan was to load us on aerocraft and take us away to some kind of detention facility. The longer I could delay being on one of those flights, the better.

  The squad leader did not show the least bit of curiosity as to what these half-dozen avout were doing in the back of the fetch, but only ordered them to move away from the vehicle and line up for collaring. The avout complied, looking nonplussed. A soldier circled around behind the fetch to check for stragglers. He saw the dead body, started, unslung his weapon—which drew the attention of his squad-mates—then relaxed and put the weapon back over his shoulder. He approached the fetch slowly. Something in his posture told me he was communicating with his mates on the wireless. I got in close enough to hear the squad leader saying to Suur Maltha—obviously the physician, since she was all stained with blood—“You have one casualty?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you require—”

  “She’s dead,” Suur Maltha said, “we don’t need a medic.” She was speaking bluntly, a little sarcastically, astounded as I had been to realize that the soldiers didn’t know. If they had only asked us, we would have told them; we wouldn’t have been able to shut up. But they hadn’t asked. They didn’t care for our knowledge, our opinions. And so all of us—all the avout—were reacting in the same way to that: to hell with them!

  The soldiers began to pop collars off their bandoliers and fit them around the necks of Maltha and her assistants. But halfway through they all stopped. Several of them raised gloves to helmets. I turned around and saw that all of the soldiers on the plaza and around the probe were behaving the same way. I reckoned the jig was up now. Some general, sitting in an office a thousand miles away where he had access to the civilian feeds, was screaming into a microphone that there was a dead alien in the back of the fetch. I supposed that in a moment all heads would turn in our direction, all soldiers would converge here.