Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  “I don’t see what—”

  “Fortunately a cosmographer at Rambalf had the presence of mind to expose a photomnemonic tablet to that light,” Jesry went on. “So we know its exact wavelength. And it has been confirmed that it doesn’t match up with any naturally occurring spectral lines.”

  “That makes no sense! Those wavelengths fall out of quantum-mechanical calculations that are basic to everything!”

  “But think of newmatter,” Jesry said.

  “Okay,” I said, and considered it. If you messed around with how the nucleus was put together, it changed the way electrons orbited around it. Laser light was the result of an electron jumping from an orbit with a higher, to another with lower, energy. The energy difference determined the wavelength—the color—of the light. “Lasers made with newmatter have colors not found in nature,” I allowed.

  Jesry was silent, waiting for me to go the next step.

  “So,” I continued, “the Geometers have newmatter—they used it to make a laser.”

  He shifted posture. Through the plastic I could see nothing but posture. Yet I knew he was disagreeing with me. And for once, I knew why.

  “But they don’t,” I continued. “At least, not in any meaningful way. I’ve handled their parachute. The shroud lines. The hatch. It was just regular stuff—too heavy, too weak.”

  He nodded. “What you couldn’t know—what none of us knew, until a few hours ago—is that it is all newmatter. Everything that came down in that probe—all the hardware, all the flesh—is what we would call newmatter, in the sense that the nuclei are put together in a way that is not natural—not in this cosmos, anyway.”

  “But most of it was destroyed!” I protested. “Or at least buried in hundreds of feet of ash.”

  “The Orithenans, and your friends, came away with some fragments. We have a T-handle panel. Some bolts that Cord put in her pocket. Scraps of chute and shroud lines. The box of blood samples. And we have the entire body of the woman who was shot in the back, thanks to Saunt Orolo.”

  This almost slipped by me. Jesry hadn’t mentioned Orolo until now. Certain nuances in his posture and voice told me he was grieving—but only because I’d known him my whole life. He was going to grieve in a funny, hidden way, over a long period of time.

  I cleared my throat. “Are a lot of people referring to him that way, now?”

  “Actually, fewer as time goes by. Right after they showed us the speely, it just flew out of people’s mouths. His actions were so obviously those of a saunt that no one even had to think about it. In the last day or so, some are pulling back—reconsidering it.”

  “What’s to reconsider!?”

  He shrugged and threw up his hands. “Don’t worry about it. You know how it is. No one wants to be hasty—to be called an Enthusiast. The Procians are probably cooking up radical new interpretations of what Orolo did in their Lucubs. Forget it. He made the sacrifice. We honor that by getting as much knowledge as we can out of the dead chick. And I’m trying to tell you that every nucleus of every atom in her, the shotgun balls in her guts, the clothing she wore, is newmatter—so the same is probably true of everything in the isocahedron.”

  “So the electrons around those nuclei behave correspondingly unnaturally,” I said, “such as lasing at the wrong color.”

  “Electron behavior is basically synonymous with chemistry,” Jesry put in. “That’s why newmatter was invented: because monkeying around with nucleosynthesis gave us new elements and new chemistry to play around with.”

  “And the functioning of living organisms is founded on chemistry,” I said.

  Jesry was smarter than I. He must have known it. But he didn’t let it show very often. No matter how many times I failed to get what he was talking about, he had this steady faith in my ability to understand what he understood. It was an endearing quality—his only one. Now, he shifted posture again, leaning in as if he were actually interested in what I had to say—letting me know I was on the right track.

  “We can’t interact chemically with the Geometers—or with any of their viruses or bacteria—because the laser was the wrong color!”

  “Some simple interactions are doubtless possible,” Jesry said. “An electron is an electron. So our atoms can form simple chemical bonds with theirs. But there’s not the sophisticated biochemistry that germs use to go about their business.”

  “So, they could make noises that we could hear. See light reflecting from our bodies. Punch us in the nose, even…”

  “Or rod us.” This was the first time I’d heard rod employed as a verb, but I collected that he was talking of the projectile that had blasted Ecba.

  “But not infect us,” I said.

  “Nor vice versa. Oh, over time, germs will evolve that can interact with both types of matter—knit the ecosystems together. But that’ll take a long time, and we can stay ahead of it. So. You’ll be out of that box soon.”

  “Do they have water? Oxygen?”

  “Their hydrogen is identical to ours. Their oxygen is similar enough to give them water. We don’t know whether we could breathe it. Carbon seems to be a little different. The metals and so on show greater divergence.”

  “How much more do you know about the Geometers?”

  “Less than you. What was Orolo doing at Orithena?”

  “Pursuing a line of inquiry that I don’t fully understand.”

  “Consistent with a polycosmic interpretation of what’s going on?”

  “Totally.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “I’m afraid to talk about it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m afraid I’ll make a bloody hash of it.”

  Jesry did not respond, and I fancied he was eyeing me suspiciously through the plastic.

  The real reason I didn’t want to talk about it, of course, was because I was afraid it would lead straight to the Incanters. And I guessed that we were under surveillance.

  “Some other time,” I said, “when I’m fresher. We can go for a walk. Like when we used to hold theorical dialogs in Orolo’s vineyard.”

  Orolo’s vineyard, because of its south-facing slope, was one of those parts of Edhar that wasn’t visible from any of the Warden Regulant’s windows, and as such, was where we used to go when we were up to some kind of mayhem. Jesry got the message, and nodded.

  “How’s Ala?” I asked.

  “Fine. I don’t know when you’ll see her, because after our Voco, she and I started having a liaison.”

  My ears caught fire and serrated bristles popped out of my spine. Or at least it felt that way. But later when I checked out a mirror, I didn’t seem any different, just a little more stupid-looking. Some higher, more modern part of my brain—that is, some part of it that had evolved more recently than five million years ago—thought it might be good to keep the conversation going. “Well. Thanks for letting me know. What’s going to happen now, then?”

  “Well, knowing her, she’s going to make a decision. And until she’s made it, neither one of us is probably going to hear from her.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “She’s busy, anyway,” Jesry went on. I had the feeling that he was finished with me, bored, and really wanted to leave. But even he knew he couldn’t just drop this bomb and walk away. So he filled a little time talking about the structure of the Convox and how it was organized. I heard little.

  That’s why he had paid me a visit so promptly. So that he could break this news to me while we were separated by steel mesh. Clever boy!

  Because (as I reflected, after he had taken his leave) he knew me, and knew I’d brood on it, and be reasonable. Why shouldn’t they have started a liaison? After Ala had been Evoked, I had thought of myself as available.

  Not that it had gotten me anywhere!

  I ate a piece of bread. Three avout in bubble suits came into the trailer. Two of them stole even more of my blood. The other stayed behind after the blood-stealers had made their getaway
. She wrenched the head from her bubble suit and tossed it on the floor. Stuffed the gloves into that. Stuck her fingers through her hair, and felt her own scalp. “Stuffy in there,” she explained, when she caught me looking. “Suur Maroa. Centenarian. Fifth Sconic. I’m from a little math you’ve never heard of. Can I have some of that bread?”

  “Aren’t you afraid you’ll be contaminated?”

  She glanced at her helmet, then back to me.

  I thought Suur Maroa was pretty attractive, but she was fifteen years older than I, and I didn’t trust myself at the moment; maybe I’d have been attracted to any female who didn’t treat me as an alien plague vector. So I got her a piece of bread. “What a godawful place!” she remarked, looking around. “Is this how extras live?”

  “Most of them.”

  “You should be out of it soon, though.” She inhaled deeply through her nose, and I could tell by the look on her face that she was thinking about what she smelled. Then she got an annoyed look, and shook her head. “Too many industrial byproducts in here,” she muttered.

  “What are you about?” I asked. “What do Fifth Sconics do? I’m sorry, I ought to know.”

  “Thank you,” she said, accepting a piece of bread from my hand, touching me incidentally. She took a bite and stared off into space as she chewed it.

  Avout who followed the Sconic Discipline had begun to splinter and fight immediately after the Reconstitution and to squabble over which sect had dibs on the names Sconics, Reformed Sconics, New Sconics, and so on. Eventually they had gone over to a numbering system. They were up into the low twenties now, so Fives were pretty well-established.

  “I don’t think that the differences between the Fives, the Fours, and the Sixes are germane here,” she finally decided. She turned to look at me. “I just want to know how they smelled.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. For example, you handled the parachute, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “If you handled a big old parachute from a military depot on Arbre, you’d be able to smell it. Maybe it would smell musty from being wadded up in a sack for a long time.”

  “If only I’d had the presence of mind to pay more attention to that!” I said.

  “It’s all right,” Suur Maroa said. She was a theor, used to setbacks. “You were kind of busy. Nice job, by the way.”

  “Oh thanks.”

  “When the cool girl—”

  “Cord.”

  “Yeah, activated the pressure equalization valves on the hatch, air moved—?”

  “In to the capsule,” I said.

  “So you didn’t get to smell their atmosphere until after it had been mixed with ours.”

  “Correct.”

  “Damn.”

  “Maybe we should have waited,” I said.

  She aimed a sharp look at me. “I don’t recommend you go around saying things like that!”

  I was taken aback. She checked herself and went on in a lower voice: “This place is the world capital of know-it-alls. Everyone is jealous. Wishes they’d been there instead of you and a bunch of Lineage weirdos. Thinks they could have done better.”

  “Okay, never mind,” I said. “We had to do what we did because we knew the military was coming to screw it up even worse.”

  “That’s more like it,” she said. “Back to the olfactory now: do you remember smelling anything, at any time?”

  “Yes! We talked about it!”

  “Not when that Ita had his speelycaptor on you, you didn’t.”

  “Before Sammann arrived. The probe had just landed. Orolo smelled the plume from the engines. He wanted to know if they were using toxic propellants—”

  “Wise of him. Some of them are frightening,” Maroa put in.

  “But we couldn’t smell anything. Decided it was all steam. Hydrogen/oxygen.”

  “That is still a negative result.”

  “But later, there was a definite odor inside the probe,” I said. “I remember it now. Associated with the body. I assumed it was some kind of bodily fluid.”

  “Assumed, because you didn’t recognize the odor?” Suur Maroa asked, after she had thought about this for as long as she wanted to.

  “It was totally new to me.”

  “So the Geometers’ organic molecules are capable of interacting chemically with our olfactory systems,” she concluded. “It’s an interesting result. Theors have been breathing down my neck wanting me to answer it—because some of those reactions are quantum-mechanical in nature.”

  “Our noses are quantum devices?”

  “Yes!” Maroa said, with a bright look that was close to a smile. “Little-known fact.” She stood up and fetched her helmet. “It’s a useful result. We should be able to get a sample from the body and expose it to olfactory tissue in a lab.” She gave me the bright look again. “Thank you!” And, in a completely absurd departure ritual, she pulled her gloves on, and lowered her helmet over her head, which I was sorry to see the last of.

  “Wait!” I said. “How could any of this be? How could the Geometers be so like us, and yet made of different matter?”

  “You’ll have to ask a cosmographer,” she said. “My specialty is cornering vermin and taking them apart.”

  “What does that make me?” I asked, but she was too preoccupied getting her helmet on to catch the joke. She passed out into a kind of airlock that they’d erected outside my front door. The door closed and locked, and the tape dispenser started making rude noises again.

  It got dark. I fretted over the contradiction. The Geometers looked like us, but were made of matter so fundamentally different that Maroa had entertained the possibility that we wouldn’t even be able to smell it. Some at the Convox were afraid of space germs; Maroa sure wasn’t.

  My being stuck in this box was a byproduct of arguments that people were having in chalk halls a few hundred yards away. I should have paid better attention to Jesry’s chitchat about what a Convox was.

  Lio showed up late and made a hooting noise at the window. It was a fake bird call that we had used, back at Edhar, when we were out after curfew.

  “I can’t see you at all,” I said.

  “Just as well. Bumps and bruises mostly.”

  “Been working out with the Valers?”

  “That would be much safer. No, I’ve been working out with people who are as clumsy as I am. The Ringing Vale avout watch and laugh.”

  “Well, I hope you’re giving as good as you’re getting.”

  “That would be satisfying on one level,” he allowed, “but no way to shine in the eyes of my instructors.”

  I felt funny talking to a blank square of plastic, so I turned off the lights and sat in the dark with him. For a long time. Thinking, not talking, about Orolo.

  “Why are they teaching you how to fight?” I asked. “I thought they had that market cornered.”

  “You jumped straight to a pretty interesting question, Raz,” he croaked. His voice had gotten all husky. “I don’t know the answer yet. Just starting to get some ideas.”

  “Well, my body clock is screwed up, I’m going to be awake all night, and the books they left me are unreadable. My girlfriend ran off with Jesry. So, I’m happy to sit here and listen to your ideas.”

  “What books did they leave you?”

  “A hodgepodge.”

  “Unlikely. There must be a common thread. You need to get on top of it before your first messal.”

  “Jesry used that word. I was trying to parse it.”

  “Comes from the diminutive of a Proto-Orth word meaning a flat surface on which food was served.”

  “So, ‘small table’—”

  “Think ‘small dinner.’ Turns out to be an important tradition here. It’s really different from Edhar, Raz. The way we used to eat—everyone together in the Refectory, carrying their own food around, sitting wherever they felt like it—they have a word for that too, not so complimentary. It is seen as backward, chaotic. Only fids and a few weird, asceti
c orders do it. Here it’s all about messals. The maximum head count is seven. That’s considered to be the largest number you can fit around a table such that everyone can hear, and people aren’t always splitting off into side conversations.”

  “So, there’s a dining hall somewhere with a lot of seven-person tables in it?”

  “No, that’d be too noisy. Each messal is held in a small private room—called a messallan.”

  “So, there’s a ring of these messallans, or something, around the Refectory kitchen?”

  Lio was chuckling at my naïveté. Not in a mean way. He’d been in the same state of ignorance a few weeks ago. “Raz, you don’t get how rich this place is. There is no Refectory—no one central kitchen. It’s all dowments and chapterhouses.”

  “They have active dowments? I thought those were abolished—”

  “In the Third Sack reforms,” he said. “They were. But you know how Shuf’s Dowment has been fixed up by the ROF? Well, imagine a concent with a hundred places like that—each of them bigger and nicer than Shuf’s ever was. And don’t get me started on the chapterhouses.”

  “I feel like a hick already.”

  “Just you wait.”

  “So there is a separate kitchen—” I stopped, unable to handle such a wild thought.

  “A separate kitchen for each messallan—cooking just fourteen servings at a time!”

  “I thought you said seven.”

  “The servitors have to eat too.”

  “What’s a servitor?”

  “We are!” Lio laughed. “When they let you out, you’ll be paired with a senior fraa or suur—your doyn. A couple of hours ahead of time, you go to the dowment or chapterhouse where your doyn is assigned for messal, and you and the other servitors prepare the dinner. When the bells ring eventide, the doyns show up and sit down around the table and the servitors bring out the food. When you’re not moving plates around, you stand behind your doyn with your back to the wall.”

  “That is shocking,” I said. “I’m half convinced you’re pulling my leg.”

  “I couldn’t believe it myself, at first,” Lio said, laughing. “Made me feel like such a hayseed. But the system works. You get to listen in on conversations you’d never get to be a part of otherwise. As years go by you move up and become a doyn and get a servitor of your own.”