Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  When I finished, there ought to have been silence—the polite response to a well-sung number. But some of the Thousanders were still muttering to one another. I even fancied I heard a snatch of music being sung back to me. In the vast swathes of pews behind the other screens, small knots of fraas and suurs were still talking about it, and being shushed by their neighbors.

  The men in the loincloths stepped up and did a computational chant of their own. It was weird-sounding in the extreme, being built on modes completely different from ours. It was hard to believe that vocal cords could be trained to make such sounds. But I had the feeling that as a computation it was quite similar to what I’d done. When they got to the end of the sequence, the potbellied one sang a sort of coda that, if I understood it correctly, stated that this was only the latest phrase of a computation that his order had been carrying out continuously for thirty-six hundred years.

  The last group were the Matarrhites: one of the very few Mathic orders that believed in God. They were the residuum of a Centenarian order that had gone hundred in the centuries just after the Reconstitution. They wore their bolts over their heads, completely covering their faces, except for a screen across the eyes. They sang a kind of dirge—a lament, I realized, for having been torn from the bosom of their concent, and a warning, as if we needed any, that they weren’t going to hang out with us any more than they absolutely had to. It was well carried off, but struck me as whiny and a bit rude.

  These performances were the next-to-last part of the aut of Inbrase. Though I hadn’t fully understood it at the time, we had already, earlier in the aut, been struck off the register of peregrins and formally enrolled in the Convox. We had renewed our vows, and funny-looking documents, hand-written on animal skin, had been despatched to our home concents letting them know we’d arrived. The songs we’d just sung represented our first, albeit symbolic, contributions to whatever it was the Convox was supposed to be doing. All that remained was to stand there while everyone else—the thousands behind the screens—stood up to sing a canticle stating that our contributions were duly accepted and that they were glad to have us. During the final verse, the hierarchs began parading out through the screen into the Unarians’ nave. We, the Inbrase groups, followed them in the same order as before. I brought up the rear. We had (at least symbolically) entered through the Day Gate and the visitors’ nave, as Saeculars, and now, having become avout once more, we exited into a math. The canticle began to lose cohesion as the last of the hierarchs filed out, and by the time I stepped over the threshold, leaving the chancel empty behind me, the melody had been devoured by the shufflings and mutterings of the Convox taking their leave.

  * * *

  Tredegarh: One of the Big Three concents, named after Lord Tredegarh, a mid-to-late Praxic Age theor responsible for fundamental advances in thermodynamics.

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

  I was on my own, back in the mathic world, officially decontaminated, free to pursue my own interests—for two seconds. Then: “Fraa Erasmas!” someone called out, as if I were being placed under arrest.

  I stopped. I was at the head of the Unarian nave, which was huge and insanely magnificent. A couple of hundred avout were already in here. Hundreds more, as well as a few Saeculars, were pouring in through the entrance at the back, quick-walking toward the front to stake out the best pews.

  The space between the front row and the screen, which ought to have been left open to provide a clear view of goings-on in the chancel, was cruddy with all sorts of Saecular equipment. A scaffolding of newmatter tubes had been erected, framing but not blocking the screen, and burly fids were already at work carrying platform-slabs into it and slamming them into place, clamping them together to create a stage, raised above the level of the floor so that people in back could see it. Riggers payed out ropes, allowing a speely projection screen to unfurl until it filled most of the space above the stage. A test pattern flashed across this and was replaced by a live feed from a speelycaptor out in the nave, providing a magnified picture of the stage. Harsh lights began to come on, as if to say “under no circumstances look in this direction!” These were mounted high on scaffold-towers positioned here and there around the space. A bolted and chorded suur walked past me talking into a wireless headset.

  The man who’d called out my name was a young hierarch whose sole charge was to channel me to one Fraa Lodoghir: a man in his sixth or seventh decade, dressed in something that was as far evolved from my bolt as a domestic fowl was from a prehistoric reptile. “Fraa Raz, my good young man!” he exclaimed, before the hierarch could trouble with a formal introduction. “Can’t say how much I enjoyed your singing. Where did you pick up that ditty? Somewhere on your world travels?”

  “Thank you,” I said. “I heard it at Orithena and couldn’t get it out of my head.”

  “Fascinating! Tell me, what are the people like there?”

  “Like us, for the most part. At first they struck me as quite different. But the more I see of the different kinds of avout here—”

  “Yes, I take your meaning!” Lodoghir said. “Those savages in the breechclouts—what tree did they fall out of?”

  I didn’t think it would be very productive for me to say that Fraa Lodoghir seemed more foreign to me than the “savages in the breechclouts,” so I nodded.

  “Has anyone explained to you that you’re about to be the guest of honor at a Plenary?” Fraa Lodoghir asked me.

  “It was mentioned but not explained.”

  Fraa Lodoghir seemed a little nonplussed by my way of talking, but after a moment’s pause he went on, “Well, briefly then, I’m to be your loctor—”

  “Loctor?”

  “InterLOCuTOR,” Fraa Lodoghir said, showing impatience, which he tried to mask with a chuckle. “You are much more formal in your pronunciation at Edhar! Good for you, sticking to your guns like that! Tell me, do you still say savant, or have you adopted saunt like the rest of us?”

  “Saunt,” I said. Fraa Lodoghir was doing so much talking that I didn’t feel the need to say much.

  “Splendid, well then, the idea is that the Convox have been crunching the numbers, analyzing the samples, perusing the speelies of the Visitation of Orithena, but there is some interest, naturally, in hearing from an eyewitness—which is why you’re here. Rather than putting you to the trouble of preparing a lecture, we shall use the format of an extemporaneous dialog. I have some questions”—he rattled a sheaf of leaves—“handed to me by various interested parties, as well as some topics of my own that I’d like to pursue, should time permit.”

  As this dialog, or rather monolog, went on, the Plenary took shape. The suur with the headset shooed us up a stairway that had been rolled into place, and Fraa Lodoghir followed me up onto the stage-platform. Microphones were clipped to our bolts. Two mugs and a pitcher of water were placed on a little stand at the back of the stage. Other than that, there was no furniture. For some reason I did not feel the slightest bit nervous, and I did not think about what I was going to say. Instead I was musing about this funny structure that my loctor and I were standing on: a snatch of geometric plane held in a three-dimensional space grid. Like a geometer’s fantasy, a modernized rendition of the Plane where the theors of Ethras used to have their dialogs.

  “Do you have any questions, Fraa Erasmas?” my loctor asked me.

  “Yes,” I said, “who are you?”

  He looked a bit regretful that I’d asked, but then his face hardened into a visage that—as I could see from a glance at the huge moving picture above us—was going to look much more impressive on a speely feed. More impressive than mine, anyway. “The First Among Equals of the Centenarian Chapter of the Order of Saunt Proc at Muncoster.”

  “Your microphone is live—now,” said a fraa, flicking a switch on the apparatus clipped to my bolt, and then he performed the same service for Fraa Lodoghir. Lodoghir poured himself a mug of water, then took a draught, gazing at me over the rim of the mug,
coolly curious to see what I was making of the news that my loctor was probably the most eminent Procian in the whole world. I have no idea what he saw.

  “The Plenary begins,” he said, in a voice that had somehow gone an octave deeper, and that was amplified all over the nave. The crowd began to quiet down, and he gave them a few more moments to suspend conversations and take seats. I could see nothing, because of the lights; Fraa Lodoghir might have been the only other person on Arbre.

  “My loctor,” Fraa Lodoghir said, and then paused a moment for silence. “My loctor is Erasmas, formerly of the Decenarian chapter of something called the ‘Edharian Order’ in a place that, unless I’ve been misinformed, styles itself as the Concent of Savant Edhar.”

  A titter ran through the nave at this ridiculously old-fashioned pronunciation.

  “Er, I think you have been misinformed—” I began, but my microphone wasn’t in the right position or something, so my voice did not get amplified.

  Meanwhile, Lodoghir was talking right over me. “They say it’s up in the mountains. Tell me, don’t you get cold, with nothing but that simple bolt between you and the elements?”

  “No, we have shoes and—”

  “Ah, for those of you who can’t hear my loctor, he is very proud to announce that the Edharians do have shoes.”

  Finally I got the microphone aimed at my mouth. “Yes,” I said. “Shoes—and manners.” This got an appreciative rumble out of the crowd. “I’m still a member of the chapter and order you mentioned, and I may be addressed as Fraa.”

  “Oh, I beg your pardon! I’ve been looking into it, and have uncovered a different story: that you went Feral a day after the start of your peregrination, and rattled around the world for a bit until you fetched up in this place called Orithena, where I gather they welcome just about anyone.”

  “They were more hospitable than some places I could mention,” I said. I thought about what Fraa Lodoghir had just said, looking for some way to break it down and plane him, but every word of it was factually correct—as he knew perfectly well.

  He was trying to bait me into quibbling over how he’d phrased it. Then he’d crush me by quoting chapter and verse. He probably had the supporting documents right there in his hand.

  That day on Bly’s Butte, Fraa Jad had told me that when he got to Tredegarh, he’d make it all okay—prevent me from getting in trouble.

  Had he failed? No. If he’d failed, they would not have permitted me to celebrate Inbrase. So Jad must have succeeded at some level. Along the way, maybe he’d made enemies.

  Who were now my enemies.

  “That is all correct,” I said. “Yet here I am.”

  Fraa Lodoghir was off balance for a moment when he saw that his first gambit had failed, but like a fencer, he had a riposte. “That is extraordinary, for one who claims to know so much of manners. Thousands of avout are in this magnificent nave. Every one of them came straight to Tredegarh when he or she was summoned. Only one person in this room chose to go Feral, and to switch his allegiance to a society, an organization, that is not a part of the mathic world: the cult of Orithena. What in the world—or should I say, who in the world—induced you to make such a self-destructive choice?”

  Now something funny happened inside of my head. Fraa Lodoghir had hit me with a sneak attack. He was good at this kind of thing and he had counters prepared for anything I might do to defend myself. My first reaction, naturally, had been to get flustered. But without knowing it, he’d just committed a tactical mistake: by making so much of my unauthorized and “self-destructive” peregrination, he had flooded my mind with memories of Mahsht and the sneak attack I had endured there: something so terrible that nothing Fraa Lodoghir could say to me could possibly be worse. His best efforts seemed kind of funny by comparison. Thinking of this made me calm, and in that calmness I noticed that Fraa Lodoghir had, with his last question, tipped his hand. He wanted me to blame it all on Fraa Jad. Give up the Thousander, he was saying, and all will be forgiven.

  Only an hour ago, Tulia had warned me not to attempt to play politics—just to tell the truth. But some combination of stubbornness and calculation told me not to give Lodoghir what he wanted.

  I thought of how the scene in Mahsht had ended, with the onslaught of the Valers. How they had observed what was going on, and construed it as an emergence. I didn’t have their training, but I knew an emergence when I saw one.

  “I did it on my own,” I said. “I accept the consequences of my decision. I knew that one such consequence might be Anathem. In that expectation I found my way to Orithena. There, I thought I might live in a Mathic style, even though Thrown Back. That I was returned to Tredegarh and allowed to celebrate Inbrase is a surprise and is an honor.”

  The Convox was as silent as it was invisible. It was just me and Lodoghir, floating in space on our scrap of plane.

  Fraa Lodoghir had given up on getting Jad, and moved on to secondary targets. “I really don’t understand how you think! You say that your objective was to live in the Mathic style? You were doing that already, weren’t you?” He turned to face the crowd in the nave. “Perhaps he just wanted to do it someplace a bit warmer!”

  The jest earned laughter from some but I could also hear an indignant strain out there beyond the lights. “Fraa Lodoghir wastes the time of the Convox!” a man called out. “The topic of this Plenary is the Visitation!”

  “My loctor has asked me to address him by what he claims is the correct title of Fraa,” Lodoghir said in return, “and as he seems to take such matters so seriously, I am merely attempting to get the facts straight.”

  “Well, I’m glad I was able to assist you,” I said. “What would you like to know about the Visitation?”

  “Since we’ve all watched the speely that was recorded by your Ita collaborator, I should think that what would be most productive would be for you to relate those parts of your experience that did not make it into the speely. What went on during those rare moments when you were able to tear yourself away from your Ita friend?”

  He was giving me so much to object to, that I was forced to make a choice: I had to let the Ita-baiting go for now. The best I could do was give the Ita a name. “Sammann arrived and began to record images a few minutes after the probe landed,” I began. “For several minutes, I saw what he saw.”

  “Not so fast, you’re starting in the middle of the story!” Fraa Lodoghir complained, in an indulgent, fatherly style.

  “Very well,” I said, “how far back do you think it would be useful for me to go?”

  “As much as I’m fascinated by the auts and folkways of the Cult of Orithena,” Fraa Lodoghir said, “we ought to confine ourselves to the Visitation proper. Pray begin at the first moment when it penetrated your awareness that something extraordinary was happening.”

  “It looked like a meteorite—which is unusual, but not extraordinary,” I said. “It didn’t burn out instantly, so I thought it must be a big one. At first it was difficult to make sense of its trajectory—until I figured out that it was headed toward us. I can’t tell you at what point I drew the conclusion that it was not a naturally occurring object. We began to run down the mountain. While we were en route, the probe’s parachute deployed.”

  “Now, when you say ‘we,’ what size of group are you speaking of?”

  Rather than wait for Fraa Lodoghir to drag this out of me, I volunteered: “Two. Orolo and I.”

  “Saunt Orolo! Yes, we know about him,” Fraa Lodoghir said. “He’s all over the speely, but we haven’t known until now how he arrived at the scene. He was the first to reach the bottom of the hole, was he not?”

  “If by ‘hole’ you mean the excavated Temple of Orithena, yes,” I said.

  “But that’s at the foot of the volcano!” he exclaimed, in a tone of voice that somehow managed to accuse me of being such a simpleton that I did not know this.

  “I’m aware of it,” I said.

  “But now we learn that you and Orolo were r
unning down from the top of the volcano while the probe was parachuting into the hole.”

  “Yes.”

  “What of the others? Were they so entranced by contemplation of the Hylaean Theoric World that they were unaware that an alien space probe was dropping into the middle of their camp?”

  “They stayed up at the rim of the excavation while Orolo ran down to the bottom alone.”

  “Alone?”

  “Well, I followed him.”

  “What on earth were you and Orolo doing on the top of the volcano after dark?” Fraa Lodoghir managed, somehow, to ask this in a tone that elicited some titters from the audience.

  “We weren’t on the top—as ought to be obvious, if you think for a moment about what a volcano is.”

  This got a whole different kind of laugh. Even Fraa Lodoghir looked faintly amused. “But you were quite high up on its slopes.”

  “A couple of thousand feet.”

  “Above the cloud layer?” he asked, as if this were extremely significant.

  “There were no clouds!”

  “I ask you again: why? What were you doing?”

  Here I hesitated. I’d have liked nothing better than to help propagate Orolo’s ideas, and I’d never have a better opportunity, what with the whole Convox listening to me. But I’d only gotten to see a fragment of his argument. I didn’t fully get what I’d heard. I knew enough, though, to know that it might lead to talk of Incanters.

  “Orolo and I went up the mountain to talk,” I said. “We became quite involved in our dialog, and didn’t notice it was getting dark.”

  “When you choose to employ the word dialog it causes me to think that the topic was something more weighty than the charms of your new Orithenan girlfriend,” Fraa Lodoghir said dryly.

  Damn, he was good! How could he know so precisely what it would take to fluster me?