Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  “What if your doyn is an idiot? What if it’s a bad messal with the same boring conversation every evening? You can’t get up and move to another table like we do at Edhar!”

  “I wouldn’t trade it for our system,” Lio said. “It’s not such an issue now, because the people who get invited to a Convox tend to be pretty interesting.”

  “So, who is your doyn?”

  “She’s the Warden Fendant of a small math on the top of a skyscraper in a big city that is in the middle of a sectarian holy war.”

  “Interesting. And where is your messallan?”

  Lio said, “My doyn and I rotate to a different one every evening. This is unusual.”

  “Hmm. I wonder where they’ll put me.”

  “That’s why you need to get on top of those books,” Lio said. “You might get in trouble with your doyn if you’re not prepared.”

  “Not prepared to do what—fold their napkin?”

  “You’re expected to understand what’s going on. Sometimes, servitors even get to take part in the conversation.”

  “Oh. What an honor!”

  “It might be a great honor, depending on who your doyn is. Imagine if Orolo were your doyn.”

  “I take your point. But that’s out of the question.”

  Lio brooded for a while before answering. “That’s another thing,” he said, in a quiet voice. “The aut of Anathem has not been celebrated at Tredegarh for close to a thousand years.”

  “How can that be? This place must have twenty times the population of Edhar!”

  “All the different chapters and dowments make it possible for weirdos and misfits to find homes,” Lio said. “You and I grew up in a tough town, brother.”

  “Well, don’t go soft on me now.”

  “That is unlikely,” Lio said, “when I spend every day sparring with Valers.”

  This reminded me that he was exhausted. “Hey! Before you go—one question,” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Why are we here? Isn’t this Convox a sitting duck?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’d think they’d have dispersed it.”

  “Ala’s been busy,” he said, “drawing up contingency plans for just that. But the order hasn’t been given yet. Maybe they’re worried it would look like a provocation.”

  “So—we are…”

  “Hostages!” Lio said cheerfully. “Good night, Raz.”

  “’Night, Lio.”

  In spite of Lio’s advice, I couldn’t get a grip on the books that had been left for me. My brain was too jangled. I tried to skim the novels. These were easier to follow, but I couldn’t fathom why I had been assigned to read such things. I got about twenty leaves into the third one, and the hero jumped through a portal to a parallel universe. The other two novels had also revolved around parallel-universe scenarios, so I reasoned that I was supposed to be thinking about that topic, and that the other books must relate to that theme. But all of a sudden my body decided it was time to sleep, and I was barely able to stagger over to bed before I lost consciousness.

  I woke to bells ringing strange changes, and Tulia calling my name. Not in a happy way. For a moment I fancied I was back at Edhar. But when I opened one eye—just a slit—all I saw was trailer.

  “My god!” Tulia exclaimed, from terrifyingly close range. I came awake to find her standing at the foot of my bed. No bubble suit. The look on her face was as if she’d found me sprawled in a gutter outside a bordello. I did some groping, and satisfied myself that most of me was covered by my bolt.

  “What is your problem?” I muttered.

  “You have to move now! Instantly! They are holding up Inbrase for you!”

  That sounded serious, so I rolled out of bed and chased her out of the trailer. The airlock had been torn down; we trampled the plastic. She led me across the courtyard, under an arch, and down some ancient Mathic catacomb whose far end was sealed off by an iron grille—the sort of barrier used to separate one math from another. It sported a gate, which was being held open by a nervous-seeming fid who clanged it shut behind us as we burst through into a long straight lane guarded by twin rows of enormous page trees. This lane cut through the middle of a forest of them.

  My feet had grown soft from wearing shoes and I kept mincing over stones and root-knuckles, so Tulia outran me. On its far side, the page-tree wood was bordered by a stone wall, thirty-odd feet high, pierced by a massive arch, where she paused to catch her breath and wait for me.

  As I drew near, she turned to face me and raised her arms. I gave her a big hug, lifting her off the ground, and for some reason both of us broke out laughing. I loved her for that. She was the only one I’d met who was responding to Orolo’s death with something other than sadness. Not that she wasn’t sad. But she was proud of him, I thought, thrilled by what he had done, glad that I had survived and come back to be with my friends once more.

  Then we were running again: through the arch and into a rolling green, splashed with coppices of great old trees, that seemed to extend for miles. Stone buildings rose up every few hundred feet, and a network of footpaths joined them. These must be the dowments and chapterhouses Lio had spoken of. I was more impressed by the lawns than anything else; at Edhar, we couldn’t afford to waste ground this way.

  The bells were getting marginally closer. As we came around the corner of an especially huge building—some sort of cloister/ library complex—the Precipice finally came in view. Tulia led me to a broad tree-lined lane that would take us straight to it. Then I was able to see the Mynster complex massed at the base of the cliff.

  The Precipice had been formed when a dome of granite, three thousand feet high, had shed its western face. Avout had cleaned up the mess below and used the crumbly bits to make buildings and walls. Since no artificial clock-tower could compete with the Precipice, they had built their Mynster at the base of the cliff and then cut tunnels and galleries and ledges into the granite above, sculpting the Precipice into their Clock, or vice versa. A succession of dials had been built over the millennia, each higher and larger than the last, and all of them still told time: all of them told me I was late.

  “Inbrase,” I gasped, “that’s—”

  “Your official induction to the Convox,” Tulia said. “Everyone has to go through it—the formal end of your Peregrination—we did it weeks ago.”

  “A lot of trouble for one straggler.”

  She laughed once, sharply, but couldn’t maintain it owing to air debt. “Don’t flatter yourself, Raz! We’ve been doing these once a week. There’s a hundred other peregrins from eight different maths—all waiting on you!”

  The bells stopped ringing—a bad sign! We picked up our pace and ran silently for a few hundred yards.

  “I thought everyone got here a long time ago!” I said.

  “Only from big concents. You would not believe how isolated some are. There’s even a contingent of Matarrhites!”

  “So I’m with the Deolaters, eh?”

  I was getting the picture that the chapterhouses closest to the Mynster were the oldest: ring around ring of cloister, gallery, walk, and yard. Glimpses, through Mathic gates and shouting arches, of chapterhouses so tiny, mean, and time-pitted that they must date back to the Reconstitution. New towers striving to make up in loftiness and brilliance what their ancient neighbors owned by dint of age, fame, and dignity.

  “Another thing,” Tulia said, “I almost forgot. Right after Inbrase there is going to be a Plenary.”

  “Arsibalt mentioned those—Jesry did one?”

  “Yes. I wish I had more time, but…just remember it’s all theater.”

  “Sounds like a warning!”

  “Any time you get that many in a room, there’s no dialog worthy of the name—it’s all stilted. Filtered.”

  “Political?”

  “Of course. Just—just don’t try to out-politic these guys.”

  “Because I’m a complete idiot when it comes to—”

  “
Exactly.”

  We ran on silently for a few more strides, and she thought better of it. “Remember our conversation, Raz? Before Eliger?”

  “You were going to nail down the political end of things,” I recalled, “so that I could memorize more digits of pi.”

  “Something like that,” she said, tossing off a chuckle just to be a good sport.

  “And how’s that plan working out?”

  “Just tell the truth. Don’t try to be tricky. It’s not in you.”

  Half of the visible universe was now grey granite. We ran up steps whose only purpose was to support steps that held up other tiers and hierarchies and systems of steps. But at some point things flattened out. An entrance was dead ahead of us, but the wrong one. Peregrins were supposed to enter from the direction of the Day Gate, so we had to run a quarter of the way around the Mynster and go in the grandest of all the entrances, which I’d have stared at for half an hour if Tulia hadn’t grabbed my chord like a leash and hauled me through. We ran through a lobby sort of thing and into a nave that was so large I thought we’d gone outdoors again. An aisle ran up the center. Three-quarters of the way along, I could see the tail end of a procession of avout, shuffling toward the chancel. Tulia dropped back, gave me a slap on the bottom that could have been heard from the top of the Precipice, and hissed: “Follow the guys in the loincloths! Do what they do!” At least thirty heads turned to stare; the pews were sparsely occupied with Saeculars.

  I dropped to a brisk walk—needed to get my breathing under control—and timed it so that I caught up with half a dozen “guys in loincloths” just as they got to the screen at the head of the aisle. Following them through, I found myself sharing a big semicircular chamber—the chancel—with an assortment of hierarchs, a choir, the guys in the loincloths, and several other contingents of avout.

  Inbrase was another one of our mathic auts. A formal program, hinged at several instants when coded movements were performed, ancient phrases called out, or symbolic objects manipulated in certain ways, and ventilated by musical entertainments and speeches from purpled hierarchs. A Saecular would have seen it as ludicrous foppery if not outright witchcraft. I tried to get back into the spirit of things and see it as an avout was supposed to. That, after all, was the point of Inbrase: to get peregrins back into the mathic frame of mind. To that end, it was more fabulous and impressive than daily auts such as Provener. Or perhaps that was just how they did everything at Tredegarh. Their hierarchs really knew how to put on a show—to grab the audience in the way that great actors did in a theater. Their raiments were really something, and their numbers were intimidating; the Primate was flanked not just by his two Wardens but by echelons of other hierarchs, and not junior ones either, but people who had sub-entourages of their own, and looked as if they might have been Primates themselves. I was looking, I realized, at some sort of high council of Primates who had all been Evoked from their concents, presumably so that they could run the Convox. Or the mathic side of it, at least. Somewhere on the other side of a screen there must be a cabinet of Panjandrums who were as important in the Saecular world as these hierarchs were in the mathic.

  I felt like a scabby mendicant, and considered it a brilliant stroke of good fortune that I was standing next to an order of avout who wore only handkerchiefs. As I looked at those, however, I began to see that these were actually bolts that had frayed away to almost nothing. The loose fibers that dangled from their fraying ends had clumped together into ropy dreadlocks that these men (they were all men) used to tie the remaining snatches of fabric around their midsections. It was our tradition at Edhar to allow one end of the bolt to fray. The most ancient members of our order, however, when they succumbed to old age, might be buried in bolts with fringes a few inches long. In this order, it seemed, bolts were passed down from older to younger avout. Some of them must be thousands of years old. One of these strange half-naked fraas had a pot belly, and the rest were gaunt. They belonged to a race that tended to live near the Equator. Their hair was wild, but not so wild as their eyes, which stared into the space above the chancel floor without seeming to register anything. I got the feeling they weren’t used to being indoors.

  The other six contingents wore full-sized bolts in complicated wraps. That was all they had in common with one another. Each of the groups was accessorized with a completely different system of turbans, hats, hoods, footgear, under-bolts, over-bolts, and even jewelry. Plainly, we at Edhar were at the austere end of the spectrum. Perhaps only the Valers and the guys in the loincloths were more ascetic than we.

  After we’d worked through the opening rounds of pomp, the Primate stepped up to say a few words. It was possible to hear people sighing and settling in the dark naves behind the screens. I risked looking down at myself and saw dirty bare feet, a rough, dull-colored bolt in the crudest possible wrap (the Just Got Up Special), scars that were still red, and bruises faded yellow-green. I was the token Feral.

  One of the other Inbrase groups—the most numerous and dressed-up—stepped forward and sang a number. They had enough strong voices to pull off six-part polyphony without showing the strain. What a fine gesture, I thought. Then the group next to them rattled off a monophonic chant, using modes and tonalities I’d never heard before. I saw the next group worrying cheat sheets out of their bolts. Finally then, understanding came over me, and I got the feeling one gets only in an especially sadistic nightmare: I was perfectly trapped. Each group had to sing something! I was a group—of one! And it wasn’t going to work for me to sheepishly wave my hands and beg off. No one at the Convox would think that was cute; no one would think it was funny.

  It wouldn’t be that bad, I told myself. Expectations would be low. I was a reasonably competent singer. If someone had stuck a piece of music in front of me and said “go!” I could have winged it—sight-read the thing. The hard part was deciding what to sing. Obviously these other groups had sorted it out weeks ago—chosen pieces that said something about who they were, what they thought about at their concents, what musical traditions they had developed to glorify the ideas most precious to them. The musical heritage of the Concent of Saunt Edhar could stand in the same ranks as those of much larger concents. I felt no insecurity there. A sizable contingent from Edhar had already arrived, though, and celebrated Inbrase. Arsibalt and Tulia had no doubt taken the matter in hand and organized a performance, anchored by Fraa Jad’s world-shaking drone, that the rest of the Convox was still talking about at their messals. What, then, was left for me? Harmony and polyphony were out of the question. I wasn’t good enough to blow everyone away with sheer skill. Best to be simple—not to overreach, not to make a fool of myself. Very few soloists were good enough that people would actually want to listen to them for more than a minute or two. I just had to do my bit, to show respect for the occasion, then step back and shut up.

  But I didn’t want to just rattle off some random scrap of lesson, which would have been easy, and would have sufficed, because—and I well know how insane this is going to sound—I wanted to touch Ala. Jesry was right about one thing: I was not going to see her until she had made up her mind. But she had to be somewhere in this Mynster, and she had no choice but to listen to what would come out of my mouth. Singing an old lesson we’d learned at Edhar might have evoked nostalgic feelings in her breast but it would be safe and dull. Jesry had been to space. But I was capable of having adventures of my own, learning new things, taking on qualities that Ala knew nothing of—yet. Was there a way of expressing that in music?

  There might be. The Orithenans had used a system of computational chanting that, it was plain to see, was rooted in traditions that their founders had brought over from Edhar. To that point, it was clearly recognizable to any Edharian. It was a way of carrying out computations on patterns of information by permuting a given string of notes into new melodies. The permutation was done on the fly by following certain rules, defined using the formalism of cellular automata. After the Second Sack reforms, new
ly computerless avout had invented this kind of music. In some concents it had withered away, in others mutated into something else, but at Edhar it had always been practiced seriously. We’d all learned it as a sort of children’s musical game. But at Orithena they had been doing new things with it, using it to solve problems. Or rather to solve a problem, the nature of which I didn’t understand yet. Anyway, it sounded good—the results, for some reason, just tended to be more musical than the Edharian version, which was serviceable for computing things, but, as music, could be hard to take. I’d spent enough time among the Orithenans to hear some of it and to gain some familiarity with the system. I’d had one tune in particular stuck in my head during the flight to Tredegarh and my time in quarantine. Maybe if I sang it aloud, it would go away.

  Once I’d thought of this, it was the obvious and easy choice. And so, when my turn came, I stepped forward and sang that piece. I sang it freely and easily, because I was not troubled by any second thoughts as to whether it was the right thing to do.

  At least, not until it was too late. Because, when I had gotten a few phrases into it, a rumble of astonishment passed like a wave through one wedge of the audience. It wasn’t loud, but it was unmistakable. I couldn’t help glancing toward it, and then I faltered, and almost lost the melody, when I saw that it had come from behind the screen of the Thousanders.

  Sensing I might have blundered into some kind of trouble, I did what any guilty fid would do: shot a furtive glance at the hierarchs. They were looking back at me. Most were glassy-eyed, but some were putting their heads together, starting a discussion. One of these, I noticed, was my old friend Varax the Inquisitor.

  I actually derived a kind of relief then, from knowing that I was helpless—whatever basket of bugs I had overturned, I couldn’t change the result now. Most of the audience heard nothing remarkable in this piece, and listened politely, so I concentrated on bringing it to a clean finish. But seeing movement in the corner of my eye, I glanced over to see that the guys in the loincloths—who’d appeared to’ve been ignoring the aut so far—had broken ranks, and shifted position so that all of them could get a clear view of me.