Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  Pretty bleak. Yet this was the first time I’d been alone for several weeks, and in that sense it could not have been more luxurious. I almost didn’t know what to do with myself. I felt dizzy, and knew that I was about to fall apart. Then I didn’t feel quite so private after all, since I guessed that I must be under surveillance. I couldn’t stop thinking about the image of my sobbing face that I had inadvertently captured in Clesthyra’s Eye after Orolo’s Anathem—the first time he had died. Some instinct told me to burrow. I went into the bathroom, turned off the light, turned on the shower, and ducked under the water. Once the temperature had stabilized I collapsed back against the wall, sank down until I was all folded up over the drain, and utterly lost control of myself. A lot went down that drain.

  I had been through adventures that might have made for good stories if Orolo hadn’t been vaporized before my eyes. Our aerocraft, along with several others, had flown to the next island up-wind and landed on a beach, scattering a crowd of locals who’d gathered there to drink wine and watch the eruption of Ecba. Other aerocraft had run out of fuel and ditched in the sea. Since they had jettisoned their life rafts to make room for passengers, many of these would have drowned had it not been for the avout, who could easily make their spheres into life buoys. A second wave of airborne commandoes had plucked them out of the water and brought them to the same beach where the rest of us had set down. This had been commandeered by the Saecular Power and cordoned off. Tents had been dropped on us and we had erected our own camp: “New Orithena,” complete with a canvas cloister in the middle and a digital alarm clock on a stick, where Provener was celebrated. We had said the aut of requiem for Orolo and the others who had not survived. Meanwhile the military had pitched larger tents around us, marched us through naked, hosed us down with unspecified chemical solutions, given us plastic bags in which to void urine and excrement. We had spent a few days living off military rations, wearing paper coveralls that we were supposed to burn when they got dirty, being called in at random times to be interviewed, phototyped, and biometrically scanned.

  Around noon on the second day, a big fixed-wing aerocraft had landed on a nearby road that had been made into a temporary aerodrome. A little while later, a caravan of vehicles had come up the beach, carrying civilians, some of whom had been dressed in bolts and chords. My name had been called. I’d walked to the camp gate, where I had encountered—across a safe, non-infectious expanse of empty sand—a contingent from Tredegarh. There had been a couple of dozen, all told. Until they had begun speaking to me in perfect Orth, I had not even recognized some of them as avout, because the style of their bolts and chords was so different from what we wore at Edhar. They originated from many different concents. I’d recognized only one of them: a Valer who’d helped save me in Mahsht. I’d caught her eye and made a hint of a bow, and she’d responded in kind.

  The FAE of this group had said something about Orolo that was actually quite respectful and well put. He had then informed me that I would help them prepare the “givens” for shipment to the Convox, and return to Tredegarh with them the next day. By “givens,” of course, he’d meant the box of vials and the body of the dead Geometer, both of which had been confiscated by the military and kept on ice in a special tent.

  Meanwhile, Sammann had been having a similar conversation with one of his brethren; a small detachment of Ita, segregated in their own vehicle.

  Thereafter it had mostly been work, which had probably been a good thing, since it had meant less brooding time for me. Since Orolo had traded the rest of his life for the theorical knowledge contained in the body of the Geometer, preparing it for shipment to Tredegarh had given me an opportunity to show it the same respect as I would have shown the body of Orolo, had we been able to give him a normal burial. Two lives had been sacrificed—one of Arbre, one of some other world—to bring us this knowledge.

  In what free time I did have, I talked to Cord. At first, I only spoke of my feelings. Later, Cord began to share her views about what had happened, and it became obvious that she was interpreting the whole thing from a Kelx point of view. It seemed that Magister Sark had got himself a convert. His words, back in Mahsht, might have made only a faint impression on her, but something about what we had lived through at Orithena had made it all seem true in her mind. And this didn’t seem like the right time for me to try to convince her otherwise. It was, I realized, like the broken stove all over again. What was the point of my having a truer explanation of these things if it could only be understood by avout who devoted their whole lives to theorics? Cord, independent soul that she was, wouldn’t want to live her life under the sway of such ideas any more than she’d want to cook breakfast with a machine that she couldn’t understand and fix.

  Wrung out, purified, shaky but stronger, I wandered around my new home.

  Half the kitchen was occupied by bottled water, palletized and stacked. The cupboards had been stocked with an odd mixture of extramuros groceries and fresh produce from the tangles and arboretums of Tredegarh. Some books had been left on the table: a few very ancient spec-fic novels (the originals, machine-stamped on cheap paper, were all dust; these had been copied out by hand on proper leaves) and a dog’s breakfast of philosophy, metatheorics, quantum mechanics, and neurology. Some was famous stuff written by people like Protas, some had been produced by avout toiling in maths I’d never heard of. I concluded that some fid had been deputized to provide me with reading material and had run through a library blindfolded, pawing books off shelves at random.

  On my bed lay a new bolt, chord, and sphere, wrapped and knotted into the traditional package. As I undid the knots and folds, kicked off the last of my Ecba garb, and got dressed, everything that had happened since I’d been walked out the Day Gate of Edhar began to seem dreamlike—as far back in the past as the time before I was Collected.

  In the kitchen I culled all of the food from the Saecular world, hiding it in the cupboards, and left the produce out where I could see and smell it. They’d provided me with everything I needed to make bread, so I set about it without thinking. The smell of it permeated the module and drove back the scents of fresh poly, carpet adhesive, and glueboard.

  I tried to read one of the metatheorics books while the dough was rising. Just as I was beginning to doze off (the book was impenetrable and my body’s clock was out of synch with the sun) someone tried to scare me to death by pounding on the walls of my trailer. I knew it was Arsibalt by the weight of the impacts. By his footfalls as he prowled around. By the methodical way he pounded on every bit of wall that presented itself—as if I could have missed it the first time.

  I opened a window and shouted through steel mesh and cloudy poly-sheet. “It is not made of stone, like the buildings you are accustomed to, and so a little pounding goes a long way.”

  A vaguely Arsibalt-shaped ghost centered itself in the aperture. “Fraa Erasmas! How good it is to hear your voice, and squint at your indistinct form!”

  “Likewise. Am I still even considered a fraa then?”

  “They are far too busy to fit your Anathem into their schedules—don’t flatter yourself.”

  A long silence.

  “I am so terribly sorry,” he said.

  “Me too.” Arsibalt seemed upset, so I nattered on for a while. “You should have seen me an hour ago! I was a mess,” I said. “Am still.”

  “You were…there?”

  “A couple of hundred feet away, I’d estimate.”

  Then he began weeping in earnest. I couldn’t very well go and put my arms around him. I tried to think of something to say. It was harder, I saw, for him. Not that watching Orolo die had been easy for me. But if it had to happen, it was better to have been there and watched it. And better, as well, to have spent a couple of days afterwards with my friends on the beach.

  After the contingent from Tredegarh had showed up and told me how it was going to be, I’d sat around a campfire with Cord, Yul, Gnel, and Sammann. It had not been necessary to p
oint out that we five might never be together again.

  “They wouldn’t bring me back to Tredegarh just to Anathematize me,” I speculated, “so I guess I’ll go back to being what I was.” I looked around at all of their faces, warm in firelight. “But I’ll never be the same.”

  “No kidding,” Yul said, “all those head injuries.”

  Ganelial Crade said, “I’m staying with these people.”

  This was so unexpected that we’d all been slow to work out what he meant: he was joining the Orithenans. “I’ve talked to Landasher about it,” he went on, amused by how we were reacting. “He says they’ll try me out for a while, and if I’m not too obnoxious, maybe I can stay.”

  Yul got up and went around the circle to hug his cousin from behind and pound him on the back. We all toasted him with our poly cups of dyed sugar water.

  Heads turned next to Sammann, who threw up his hands and admitted, “All of this has been very good for my reputation and access.” We all hurled mock abuse at him for a while. He soaked it up with a satisfied smile. “I’ll be flying back to the Convox with Fraa Erasmas—probably in a different section of the plane, though.” This moved me, and so I got up, walked over, and embraced him while I was still allowed to.

  Finally attention turned to Cord and Yul, who were sitting on a cooler and leaning against each other. “Now that we are Arbre-leading experts on Geometer technology,” Yul began, “we might go out and seek employment as such.”

  “Seriously,” Cord said, “there are a lot of people here who want to ask us questions. Since the probe got destroyed, our memories of what we saw are important. We might even end up at Tredegarh.”

  “Yul’s rig too,” I remarked. I had a dim memory of its wreckage hurtling past Fraa Orolo. For once, Yul had nothing to say. He just gazed out over the sea and shook his head.

  Cord reminded us, “My fetch should be safe at Norslof. Once things have settled down a little, we’ll go back and collect it. Then we were thinking of going up into the mountains for a while—a delayed honeymoon.”

  A silence ensued. She let it stretch out just long enough before saying, “Oh, did I mention we’re engaged?”

  The previous evening, Yul had approached me with a conspiratorial look and drawn a shiny thing from his pocket: a metal ring that he had cut free from the rigging of the Geometers’ parachute. He’d heated it in a campfire blown white-hot with an improvised bellows, and hammered it into a size that he hoped would fit Cord’s finger.

  “I was going to ask Cord to—well—you know. Not right away! But later, you know, when things are settled.”

  I’d realized that Yul was, in a way, asking my permission, so I’d moved to embrace him and said, “I know you’ll take care of her.” His hug had nearly broken my spine and I’d thought for a moment I’d have to summon one of the Valers to come and pry him off me.

  After he’d calmed down a little, he’d let me look at the ring. “Not your normal jewel,” he admitted, “but—being that it’s from another world and all—it’s the rarest, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I assured him, “it’s the rarest.” Then both of us had involuntarily looked over at my sib.

  He must have asked her earlier in the day, and she must have said yes. For a while, there was wild hugging, hollering, and running around. A mob of Orithenans gathered around us, drawn by a rumor that the wedding was going to happen now. They were followed by curious soldiers, followed in turn by Convox people who wanted to know what all the fuss was about. There was a kind of crazy momentum pushing us toward holding the ceremony that day, on the beach. But after a few minutes, everyone settled down, and it turned into a party. Orithenan suurs uprooted armloads of weedy flowers from the ditch along the road and braided them into garlands. The soldiers got into the spirit of things, producing booze from nowhere, and cheering Cord and Yul with gutsy noises. A helicopter mechanic gave Cord his favorite daisy-head screwdriver.

  An hour later I was on the plane to Tredegarh.

  Arsibalt was settling down a little. He drew a deep, shaky breath. “He accepted his fate quite calmly, it seemed.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know the meaning of the symbol he drew on the ground? The analemma?”

  Something occurred to me. “Hey!” I said. “How do you know all of this stuff? Have they been letting you watch speelies?”

  He was glad to have an excuse to declaim about something. It settled him right down. “I forget you know nothing of the Convox. Whenever they wish to say something to everyone—for example, when Jesry came back from space—they summon us to a so-called Plenary in the nave of the Unarians, the only place big enough to hold the entire Convox. Rules are relaxed; they show us speelies. Anyway, there was an all-day Plenary—most enervating—after the Visitation of Orithena.”

  “Is that what they’re calling it?”

  I could see him nodding. It was hard to make out details through the poly, but I feared he might be trying to grow a beard again.

  “Well,” I said, “I spent a few days with him before…before the events you saw on the speely. Of course, I saw the original Analemma, the ancient one on the Temple floor.”

  “Now that must have been something!” Arsibalt gushed.

  “It was. Especially now that we can never go back,” I said. “But as for the analemma that Orolo drew on the beach, I’m afraid I didn’t get any special insight to decode the meaning of…”

  “Is something the matter?” Arsibalt asked, a few seconds later. For I had trailed off.

  “I just remembered something,” I said. “A remark Orolo made. The last thing he said to me, before the probe fired its thrusters. ‘They must have deciphered my analemma!’”

  “‘They’ meaning the Geometers, presumably.”

  “Yeah. Too much was happening for me to ask him what it meant…”

  “And then it was too late,” Arsibalt said.

  Orolo’s death was still new enough that we had to stop talking for a few moments whenever it came up in conversation. But both of us were thinking. “A phototype on the wall of his cell, at Bly’s Butte,” I said, “showed the Analemma. The ancient one.”

  “Yes,” Arsibalt said. “I remember seeing it.”

  “Almost as if it were the equivalent of a religious symbol to him,” I said, “like the Triangle is to certain Arks.”

  “But that doesn’t explain his remark about the Geometers ‘deciphering’ it,” Arsibalt pointed out.

  We sat there puzzling over it for a few more moments, but could make no headway.

  “So,” I said, “at the Plenary after Jesry came back from space…did you see what happened to the Warden of Heaven?”

  “Did you?” he asked. Then both of us were silent for a minute, daring each other to say something funny and inappropriate. But somehow it didn’t seem like the right time, yet.

  “How are the others?”

  He sighed. “I don’t see much of them. We have all been assigned to different Laboratoria. Periklyne is absolute bedlam, of course. And we have chosen different Lucubs.”

  I could only guess at the meanings of those words. “But maybe you can at least tell me how they are doing?”

  “You need to know it is different for Jesry and Ala,” he began.

  “Why?”

  “Because they were summoned in Voco. They died, as do all whose names are called out thus, and they had to begin new lives. Some of them quite liked it. All of them got used to it. Then, suddenly, weeks later, the thing changed into a Convox.”

  “They had to undie.”

  “Yes. You should expect some awkwardness.”

  “Awkwardness! Well, at least something about this place will be familiar then.”

  Arsibalt cleared his throat instead of laughing.

  “They are going to let you out of this contraption in no time,” Jesry told me. Somewhat confounding Arsibalt’s prediction, he came to visit me before my bread was even finished cooling.

  He had spoken wi
th such absolute confidence that I knew he had to be blowing this out of his rectal orifice. “What is the basis of your prediction?” I asked.

  “The lasers were the wrong color,” he said.

  I repeated this sentence out loud, but could make nothing of it.

  “The laser that shone down onto the Inviolates,” he explained, “on the night that this turned into a Convox.”

  “It was red,” I said—pretty stupid, but I was trying to dislodge loose bits of information from Jesry’s brain by throwing rocks at it.

  “Some here at Tredegarh are knowledgable about lasers,” Jesry said. “They knew right away that something was funny. There are only so many gases, or combinations of gases, that can be used to make a red laser. Each generates a different wavelength. A laser expert can look at a spot of light and know right away what gas mixture was used as the lasing medium. They didn’t recognize the color of the Geometers’ laser.”