Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  Bells began ringing, high up on the Precipice. It sounded like the call to Provener. How did they wind their clock here?

  A memory came to me of Lio, a few months ago, winding the clock with two black eyes after he had asked me to punch him in the face. I tried to summon whatever Lio had learned to summon that day. I forced myself to go on as if the blows had never landed.

  “This much of your statement is correct, that it was a serious theorical discussion.”

  “And what was so much on Orolo’s mind that he had to drag you up a volcano to get it off his chest?”

  I was rolling my eyes and shaking my head in amazement.

  “Did it have anything to do with the Geometers?” he tried.

  “Yes.”

  “Then I don’t understand your reticence on this topic. If it relates to the Geometers, it is of interest to the Convox, is it not?”

  “I’m reluctant because I only got to hear a small part of his thoughts and I fear I won’t do them justice.”

  “Stipulated! Everyone has heard and understood your disclaimer now, so you have no reason to go on hoarding information.”

  “Because he was Anathematized, Orolo lost the ability to gather data about the Geometers. He never even saw the only good picture of their ship that he managed to take. So his thinking about them, from that point onward, had to be based on the only givens he still had access to—”

  “I thought you just said he had access to no givens.”

  “None emanating from the icosahedron.”

  “So just what other kind of givens are there?”

  “The givens that you and I are taking in all the time, simply by virtue of being conscious, and that we can observe and think about on our own, without any need for scientific instruments.”

  Fraa Lodoghir blinked in fake amazement. “Do you mean to claim that the subject of your dialog was consciousness?”

  “Yes.”

  “Specifically, Orolo’s consciousness? Since that, presumably, is the only one he has access to.”

  “His, and mine,” I corrected him, “since I was part of the dialog too, and it was clear that Orolo’s observations of his consciousness tallied with my observations of mine.”

  “But I thought you told me, only a minute ago, that this very same dialog was about the Geometers!”

  “Yes.”

  “But you now contradict yourself by admitting it was about the features shared between your consciousness, and that of Orolo!”

  “And that of the Geometers,” I said, “because they clearly possess consciousness.”

  “Ohh,” Fraa Lodoghir exclaimed, and got a faraway look in his eyes, as if trying to wrap his mind around something impossibly absurd. “Are you trying to say that just because you and Orolo are conscious, and the Geometers are too (which I’ll give you for the sake of argument), that you can learn something about how the Geometers’ minds work, simply by gazing at your own navel long enough?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Well, I’m certain that the Lorites are going to have a field day with this. But to me it seems you are saying too little and too much at the same time!” Fraa Lodoghir complained. “Too little, because we here on Arbre have been gazing at our navels for six thousand years and still don’t understand ourselves. So what does it boot us to be as in the dark about the Geometers as we are about our own minds? And too much, because you really are going too far in assuming that the Geometers would think like us at all.”

  “As to that last point, one can make strong arguments that all conscious beings must have certain mental processes in common.”

  “Strong arguments that no disciple of Halikaarn will examine too closely, I’m sure,” Fraa Lodoghir said dryly, earning a chortle from every Procian at the Convox.

  “As to your first point,” I continued, “namely, that we still don’t understand ourselves after six thousand years of introspection, I believe that Orolo was of the view that we might be able to settle some of those ancient questions now that we have access to conscious beings from other star systems.”

  This settled the crowd down, and they became so markedly quiet that I knew they must all be concentrating intensely. We had got to the heart of the matter. The Sphenic and Protan systems had been dueling for millennia, and continued the struggle here in this nave under the names of Procians and Halikaarnians, Lodoghir and Erasmas. The only thing they agreed on was the words I’d just put in Orolo’s mouth: that the Geometers might tip the scales to one side or the other. Not necessarily because they would know the answers themselves—they might be just as confused as we were—but because of the new givens we could now obtain. And that was the true goal of many at this Convox. Never mind whatever mission statement the Saecular Power had handed us.

  Even Fraa Lodoghir knew to observe a few moments’ silence, to give this the respect it deserved. Then he said: “If they were smart swarms of simple-minded bugs, or systems of pulsating energy fields, or plants speaking a chemical language to one another—something enormously different from us—then perhaps Orolo’s lucubrations in the extinct pseudo-philosophy of Evenedric might provide us with a few moments’ diversion. But the Geometers look like us. Orolo couldn’t have known that this was the case, so we may forgive him for his temporary delusion.”

  “But why do they look like us?” I asked. Realizing, as I said it, that I was making a tactical error by asking a question—even a rhetorical one.

  “Let me help you,” Fraa Lodoghir said, magnanimously offering the hopelessly confused fid a helping hand, his giant face, on the screen above, a picture of amused beneficence. “We know that for months and months, before anyone else knew that the Geometers were up there, Orolo was up to something. Using the cosmographical devices at your concent to track the icosahedron.”

  “We know exactly what he was up to,” I began.

  Fraa Lodoghir cut me off: “We know what you were told: a story that many of your own fraas and suurs refuse to believe! And we know that Orolo was Thrown Back. That his fellow-cultists in the shadowy group known as the Lineage spirited him halfway around the world to Ecba: by an amazing coincidence, the place where the Geometers just happened to make their first landfall—and to do it on the very evening when this Orolo happened to mount a long and exhausting nocturnal expedition to the rarefied heights of an active volcano!”

  “It’s not long, it’s not exhausting, and we didn’t go up at night—” I tried to say. But he had reduced me once again to quibbling, and all I’d done was let him draw breath and get a sip of water.

  “Help us now, Fraa Erasmas,” Fraa Lodoghir said, in a perfectly reasonable tone. “Help us solve the riddle that has so bedeviled us.”

  “Who is ‘us’ in this case?” I demanded.

  “Those, here at the Convox, who sense that there is something more to Orolo than what we’ve been allowed to see on the speely.”

  I couldn’t keep the tiredness out of my voice as I answered. “What riddle are you speaking of?”

  “How did Orolo signal the Geometers? What trick was he using to send them his secret messages?”

  Here, if I’d been having a drink, I’d have spat it out. Fraa Lodoghir’s statement raised a commotion: waves of murmuring, shock, anger, and derisive laughter clashed, lapped, and rolled from one end of the nave to the other. I was too dumbfounded to speak, but merely stood there looking at him for a long while, waiting for him to show signs of embarrassment and withdraw the accusation. But the look on his face was as pleasant, as unself-conscious as it could be. And as his calm, his confidence waxed, mine waned. I wanted so desperately to plane him!

  But Orolo’s words came back to me: they deciphered my analemma! As if he had somehow sent them a signal.

  Why else would they have chosen to land at Orithena—the very place, in the whole world, where Orolo had sought sanctuary? Why else would Orolo have made the long and hazardous journey to Orithena?

  Back to the matter at hand: I dared not enter
a serious Dialog with Lodoghir, here, before this audience, on this topic. He’d plane me so badly they’d have to scrub my remains off the floor with a sandblaster. And he’d take Orolo down with me.

  My dialog with Fraa Lodoghir was being witnessed by Saeculars. Important Saeculars. Panjandrums, as Orolo would call them. Maybe his sleazy tricks were actually working on them.

  What was it people used to say of the Rhetors? That they had the power to alter the past, and that they did so every chance they got.

  I had no power to duel a Rhetor. All I could do was speak the truth and hope it might be heard by friends who could wield such power.

  “That’s a novel suggestion,” I said. “I don’t know how you do things in the Order of Saunt Proc, but as an Edharian, I would look for evidence.”

  “What of the famous Steelyard?” Lodoghir asked.

  “The Steelyard favors the simpler hypothesis. Orolo not sending secret messages to an alien starship is simpler than what you are proposing.”

  “Oh no, Fraa Erasmas,” said Lodoghir with an indulgent chuckle, “I’ll not let you slip that one past me. Try to remember that intelligent people are listening to us! If Orolo sending messages explains what is otherwise mysterious, then it is the simpler hypothesis!”

  “What mysteries do you think it explains?”

  “Three, to be exact. Mystery the First: that the probe landed on the ruins of Orithena, an otherwise desolate and uninteresting site whose most conspicuous feature is an analemma, clearly visible from space.”

  “Anything is clearly visible from space if you have good enough optics,” I pointed out. “Remember that the Geometers decorated their ship with a proof of the Adrakhonic Theorem. What is more reasonable than for them to land on the Temple of Adrakhones?”

  “They must know we’re here,” Lodoghir pointed out. “If they wanted to talk to theors, why not simply land at Tredegarh?”

  “Why blast each other with shotguns? You can’t burden me with responsibility for explaining everything that the Geometers do,” I said.

  “Mystery the Second: Orolo’s suicide.”

  “No mystery there. He made a choice to preserve a priceless specimen.”

  “He weighed his own life against that specimen,” Lodoghir said, making a scale-balancing gesture with his two hands. “Mystery the Third: he drew an analemma on the ground in the final instants of his life, and stood on it to meet the fate he had chosen.”

  I had nothing to say. It was a mystery to me as well.

  “Orolo accepted his responsibility,” Lodoghir said.

  “You have completely lost me.”

  “Somehow, Orolo sent a message to the Geometers during those months when he was one of the only persons on Arbre who knew they were up there. I speculate that the message took the form of an analemma. A sign, telling the Geometers to make their landfall on the analemma that is—or used to be—so clearly visible at Orithena. Once Thrown Back, he went there, and waited. And lo, the Geometers did make landfall there. But not in the manner that Orolo had, perhaps naïvely, anticipated. A faction among the Geometers sent down an illicit probe. The alien woman sacrificed her life. The dominant faction retaliated by rodding Ecba, with deadly results at Orithena. Orolo understood that he bore responsibility for what had happened. Throwing the dead woman into the aerocraft was his self-imposed penance, and drawing the analemma on the ground was his way of admitting responsibility for what he had done.”

  As Lodoghir had proceeded through this indictment, his tone had changed: like an Inquisitor at first, but softening as he went on, so that by the time he reached the last part, he seemed regretful. Moved. I was spellbound. Perhaps this Rhetor did have magical powers to reach in and meddle with my brain—to change the past. But much more so, I was almost certain that he was right.

  “You still have no evidence—only a good story,” I finally said. “Even if you do find evidence, and prove you’re right, what does it really say about Orolo? How could he have anticipated a civil war among the Geometers? The Geometer who gave the order to drop a rod on Ecba—doesn’t he, or she, and not Orolo, deserve responsibility for the deaths below? So even if some elements of your hypothesis are proved, there is still room for dialog as to Orolo’s state of mind when the glowing cloud struck him down. I think he was accepting a kind of responsibility, yes. But by planting himself on that analemma and waiting to die, I think he was saying something other than what you’re trying to put in his mouth. I think he was saying ‘I stand by what I did in spite of all this.’”

  “A bit cheeky, wouldn’t you say? Don’t you think he ought to have deferred to the Saecular Power? Let them weigh the evidence—make a considered judgment as to how best we ought to treat with the Geometers?” Lodoghir’s eyes glanced to the side, as if to remind me that the Panjandrums were out there in the dark, listening for my answer.

  And now I made the only move, out of this whole Dialog, that I was later proud of: I did not say what I was thinking: the Warden of Heaven already tried that, remember? But I didn’t have to. A low murmur had begun to run through the audience, building toward mirth. All I had to do was sit silently and wait for the whole Convox to perceive just how ludicrous my loctor’s statement really was. And—I sensed—this had been a considered move on his part.

  “That depends,” I said, “on how it all comes out in the end.”

  Lodoghir raised his eyebrows and turned away from me to face the speelycaptor. “And that,” he said, “is the whole point of this Convox. I suppose we ought to get to work.” He made a gesture. The microphones died and the speely screen went dark. Everyone in the nave began talking at once.

  I was alone on the platform, and it was dark; Fraa Lodoghir had scurried down the steps, probably so that I could not tear his tongue out with my bare hands. The crew were already dismantling the stage. I took off my microphone, had a good long drink of water, and trudged down the steps, feeling as if I’d just spent an hour as a punching bag for Lio.

  A few people seemed to be waiting for me. One in particular caught my eye, because he was a Saecular, dressed in important-person clothes. He had made up his mind that he was going to be the first person to talk to me, so rather than wait for me to reach the bottom of the steps he bounded up and met me halfway. “Emman Beldo,” he said, and then rattled off the name of some government ministry or other. “Would you mind telling me what the hell that was all about?”

  He was younger than he looked in those clothes, I realized: only a few years older than I.

  “Why don’t you ask Fraa Lodoghir?” I suggested.

  Emman Beldo chose to interpret that as dry humor. “I came here expecting to hear about the Geometers—” he began.

  “And instead we talked about consciousness and analemmas.”

  “Yeah. Look. Don’t get me wrong. I put in five years as a Unarian…”

  “You’re a literate, smart Burger, you read stuff and use your brain for a living, but still you can’t fathom what just happened—”

  “When we need to be talking about the threat! And how to address it!”

  I lost focus for a moment, gazing down to the base of the stairs where a cluster of fraas and suurs all wanted to talk to me. I was trying to size them up without making eye contact. Some, I feared, styled themselves members of the Lineage and wanted to exchange secret handshakes with me. Others probably wanted to spend the whole afternoon telling me why Evenedric was wrong. There would be hard-core Halikaarnians furious because I had not managed to plane Fraa Lodoghir, and people like Suur Maroa who had specific questions about what I’d seen at Orithena. I was thinking it might be easier to have a regular job like Emman Beldo…

  Fraa Lodoghir saved me—sort of. He pushed forward to the base of the steps. He had just finished a heated discussion with a senior hierarch. “Well, now you’ve gone and done it, Fraa Erasmas!” he said.

  “Gone and done what, Fraa Lodoghir?”

  “Gotten us relegated to the outer darkness—the arse-end of
the mathic world, as far as I’m concerned.”

  “Wouldn’t that be the Concent of Savant Edhar?”

  “No, there’s one place left that’s even worse,” he proclaimed. “The Plurality of Worlds Messal at Avrachon’s Dowment. That is where we will be taking our sustenance until I can get the hierarchs to see reason.”

  “Who’s this ‘we’ you’re talking about?”

  “You need to pay attention, Fraa Erasmas!”

  “Attention to what?”

  “Your place in the Convox!”

  “And what is my place?”

  “Standing behind me while I eat. Folding my napkin when I get up to use the toilet.”

  “What!?”

  “You are my servitor, Fraa Erasmas, and I am your doyn. I like a damp face-cloth before dinner, warm but not too warm. See to it—if you don’t want to spend the rest of the Convox studying the Book.” He turned and strode out.

  Emman Beldo was looking at me interestedly.

  I should have been crushed by this terrible news, but I was a little punch-drunk, and it tickled me to see Fraa Lodoghir so irritated.

  “Well,” I said to Emman Beldo, “now you have a choice. If you want to learn about the threat posed by the Geometers, you can go anywhere except where I’m going. If you want an answer to why we spoke of such out-of-the-way topics during this Plenary, you can join me and Fraa Lodoghir at the arse-end of the mathic world.”

  “Oh, I’ll be there!” he said. “My doyn wouldn’t miss it.”

  “And who is your doyn?”

  “You and I will address her as ‘Madame Secretary,’” he cautioned me, “but her name is Ignetha Foral.”

  Part 10

  MESSAL

  Lorite: A member of an Order founded by Saunt Lora, who believed that all of the ideas that the human mind was capable of coming up with, had already been come up with. Lorites are, therefore, historians of thought who assist other avout in their work by making them aware of others who have thought similar things in the past, and thereby preventing them from reinventing the wheel.