Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

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

  The Geometers have us pinned down like a biological sample on a table,” said Ignetha Foral, after we had served the soup. “They can poke and prod us at their leisure, and observe our reactions. When we first became aware that they were in orbit around Arbre, we assumed that something was going to happen soon. But it has been maddeningly slow. The Geometers can get all the water they need from comets, all the stuff they need from asteroids. The only thing they can’t do—we suspect—is go on interstellar voyages. But it could be that they aren’t in that much of a hurry.” She paused to whet her whistle. A bracelet gleamed on her wrist. It looked valuable but not gaudy. Everything about her confirmed what Tulia had told us, months ago, at Edhar: that she came from a moneyed Burger clan with old ties to the mathic world. It wasn’t clear, yet, why she was here, and carrying the impressive-sounding title of “Madame Secretary.” According to the information Tulia had dug up, she had been deposed from her Saecular job by the Warden of Heaven. But that was old news. The Warden of Heaven had been thrown out of the airlock a few weeks ago. Perhaps, while I’d been distracted on Ecba, the Saecular Power had reorganized itself, and she’d been dusted off and given a new job.

  Having taken a bit of refreshment, Madame Secretary made eye contact with the other six at the table. “Or at least that’s what I say to my colleagues who want to know why I’m wasting my time at this messal.” She said this in a good-humored way. Fraa Lodoghir laughed richly. Everyone else was able to manage at least a chuckle except for Fraa Jad, who was staring at Ignetha Foral as if she were the aforementioned biological specimen. Ignetha Foral was sharp enough to notice this. “Fraa Jad,” she said, inclining her head slightly in his direction, in a suggestion of a bow, “naturally takes the long view of things, and is probably thinking to himself that my colleagues must have dangerously short attention spans. But my métier, for better or worse, is the political workings of what you call the Saecular Power. And to many in that world, this messal looks like a waste of some very good minds. The kindest thing some will say of it, is that it is a convenient place to which difficult, irrelevant, or incomprehensible persons may be exiled, so that they don’t get in the way of the important business of the Convox. How would you at this table recommend that I counter the arguments of those who say it ought to be done away with? Suur Asquin?”

  Suur Asquin was our host: the current Heritor of Avrachon’s Dowment, hence its owner in all but name. Ignetha Foral had called on her first because she looked as though she had something to say, but also, I suspected, because it was the correct etiquette. For now, I was giving Suur Asquin the benefit of the doubt, because she had helped us make dinner, working side by side with her servitor, Tris. This was the very first Plurality of Worlds Messal, and so it had taken us a while to find our way around the kitchen, get the oven hot, and so forth.

  “I believe I’d have an unfair advantage, Madame Secretary, since I live here. I’d answer the question by showing your colleagues around Avrachon’s Dowment, which as you’ve all seen is a kind of museum…”

  I was standing behind Fraa Lodoghir with my hands behind my back holding the knotted end of a rope that disappeared into a hole in the wall and ran thirty feet to the kitchen. Someone tugged on the other end of it, silently calling for me. I leaned forward to make sure that my doyn didn’t need his chin wiped, then walked around the table, sidestepping in front of other servitors. Meanwhile Suur Asquin was trying to develop an argument that merely looking at the old scientific instruments scattered around the Dowment would convince the most skeptical extra that pure metatheorics was worthy of Saecular support. Seemed obvious to me that she was using Hypotrochian Transquaestiation to assert that pure metatheorics would be the sole occupation of this messal, which I didn’t agree with at all—but I mustn’t speak unless spoken to, and I reckoned that the others here could take care of themselves. Fraa Tavener—aka Barb—was standing behind Fraa Jad, looking at Suur Asquin as a bird looks at a bug, just itching to jump in and plane her. I gave him a wink as I went by, but he was oblivious. I passed through a door, padded for silence, and entered a stretch of corridor that served as an airlock, or rather sound-lock. At its end was another padded door. I pushed through—it was hinged to swing both ways—and entered the kitchen, a sudden and shocking plunge into heat, noise, and light.

  And smoke, since Arsibalt had set fire to something. I edged toward the sand bucket, but, not seeing any open flames, thought better of it. Suur Asquin could be heard over a speaker; the Saecular Power had sent in Ita to rig up a one-way sound system so that we in the kitchen—and others far away, I had to assume—could hear every word spoken in the messallan.

  “What’s the problem?” I asked.

  “No problem. Oh, this? I incinerated a cutlet. It’s all right. We have more.”

  “Then why’d you yank me?”

  He made a guilty glance at a plank on the wall with seven rope-ends dangling from it, all but one chalked with a servitor’s name. “Because I’m desperately bored!” he said. “This conversation is stupid!”

  “It’s just getting started,” I pointed out. “These are just the opening formalities.”

  “It’s no wonder people want to abolish this messal, if this is a fair sample of—”

  “How is yanking my rope going to help?”

  “Oh, it’s an old tradition here,” Arsibalt said, “I’ve been reading up on it. If the dialog gets boring, the servitors show their disdain by voting with their feet—withdrawing to the kitchen. The doyns are supposed to notice this.”

  “The odds of that actually working with this group are about as high as that this dinner won’t make them sick.”

  “Well, we must begin somewhere.”

  I went over to the ropes, picked up a lump of chalk, and wrote “Emman Beldo” under the one that was still unlabeled.

  “Is that his name?”

  “Yeah. He talked to me after Plenary.”

  “Why didn’t he help cook?”

  “One of his jobs is driving Madame Secretary around. He only got here five minutes ago. Anyway, extras can’t cook.”

  “Raz speaks the truth!” said Suur Tris, coming in from the garden with a bolt-load of firewood. “Even you guys seem a little challenged.” She hauled open the hatch of the oven’s firebox and gazed on the coal-bed with a critical eye.

  “We shall prove our worth anon,” said Arsibalt, picking up a huge knife, like a barbarian warlord called to single combat. “This stove, your produce, your cuts of meat—all strange to us.” And then, as if to say speaking of strange…Arsibalt and I both glanced over at a heavy stew-pot, which had been pushed to the back of the stove in hopes that the vapors belching out of it would stink less if they came from farther away.

  Suur Tris was nudging coals around and darting bits of wood into the firebox as if it were brain surgery. We’d made fun of her for this until our efforts to manage it ourselves had produced the kinds of outcomes normally associated with strategic nuclear warfare. Now, we watched contritely.

  “Kind of weird for Madame Secretary to open by saying the messal’s a drain trap for losers,” I said.

  “Oh, I disagree. She’s good!” Tris exclaimed. “She’s trying to motivate them.” Tris was podgy and not especially good-looking, but she had the personality of a beautiful girl because she’d been raised in a math.

  “I wonder how that’s going to work on my doyn,” I said, “he’d like nothing more than to see this canceled, so he can go dine with cool people.”

  A bell jingled. We turned to look. Seven bells were mounted to the wall above the seven rope-ends; each was connected, by a long ribbon routed through the wall and under the floor, to the underside of the table in the messallan, where it terminated in a velvet pull. A doyn could summon his servitor, silently and invisibly, by yanking on the pull.

  The bell rang once, paused, then began to jangle nonstop, more and more violently, until it looked like it was abo
ut to jump off the wall. It was labeled “Fraa Lodoghir.”

  I returned to the messallan, walked around behind him, and bent forward. “Get rid of this Edharian gruel,” he breathed. “It is perfectly unpalatable.”

  “You should see what the Matarrhites are cooking up!” I muttered. Fraa Lodoghir glanced across the table at an avout—one of those who’d celebrated Inbrase with me, earlier in the day—whose face was covered by his or her bolt. The fabric had been drawn sideways over his or her head, as if to form a hood, but the hood had then been pulled down to cover the face, with an opening below through which food—if that was the correct word for what the Matarrhites put into their mouths during meals—could be introduced. “I’ll have what it’s having,” Lodoghir hissed. “But not this!”

  I glanced significantly at Fraa Jad who was shoveling the stuff into his mouth, then confiscated Lodoghir’s serving and whisked it out of there, happy to have an excuse to go back to the kitchen. “Perfectly unpalatable,” I repeated, heaving it into the compost.

  “Perhaps we should slip him some Allswell,” Arsibalt suggested.

  “Or something stronger,” I returned. But before we could develop this promising theme, the back door swung open and in walked a girl swathed in a hectare of heavy, scratchy-looking black bolt, lashed to her body with ten miles of chord. Her punched-in sphere was overflowing with mixed greens. Out of doors, she kept her head covered, but once she had set the greens down she swept her bolt back to reveal her perfectly smooth dome, all dotted with perspiration, since it was a warm day and she was overdressed. Arsibalt and I did not feel as easy around Suur Karvall as we did around Tris, so all banter stopped. “That’s a lovely selection of greens,” Tris began, but Karvall flinched and held up a bony, translucent hand, gesturing for silence.

  Fraa Lodoghir had begun speaking. I reckoned that was why he’d wanted his “gruel” cleared away.

  “Plurality of Worlds,” he began, and let it resonate for a long moment. “Sounds impressive. I haven’t the faintest idea what it means to some here. The mere fact of the Geometers’ existence proves that there is at least one other world, and so on one level it is quite trivial. But since it appears that I am the token Procian at this messal, I shall play my role, and say this: we have nothing in common with the Geometers. No shared experiences, no common culture. Until that changes, we can’t communicate with them. Why not? Because language is nothing more than a stream of symbols that are perfectly meaningless until we associate them, in our minds, with meaning: a process of acculturation. Until we share experiences with the Geometers, and thereby begin to develop a shared culture—in effect, to merge our culture with theirs—we cannot communicate with them, and their efforts to communicate with us will continue to be just as incomprehensible as the gestures they’ve made so far: throwing the Warden of Heaven out the airlock, dropping a fresh murder victim into a cult site, and rodding a volcano.”

  As soon as he paused, reactions came through on the speakers, several people talking over each other:

  “I don’t agree that those are incomprehensible.”

  “But they must have been watching our speelies!”

  “You’re missing the point of the Plurality of Worlds.”

  But Suur Asquin spoke last, and most distinctly. “Many other messals are addressing the topics you mentioned, Fraa Lodoghir. In the spirit of Madame Secretary’s opening question: why should we have a separate Plurality of Worlds Messal?”

  “Well, you might simply ask the hierarchs who brought it into existence!” Fraa Lodoghir answered a little disdainfully. “But if you want my answer as a Procian, why, it is quite straightforward: the arrival of the Geometers is a perfect laboratory experiment, as it were, to demonstrate and to explore the philosophy of Saunt Proc: put simply, that language, communication, indeed thought itself, are the manipulation of symbols to which meanings are assigned by culture—and only by culture. I only hope that they haven’t watched so many of our speelies that their minds have been contaminated, and the experiment ruined.”

  “And this relates to our theme how?” Suur Asquin prodded him.

  “She knows perfectly well,” Suur Tris assured us, “she’s just making sure it all gets spelled out for Ignetha Foral.”

  “Plurality of Worlds means a plurality of world cultures—cultures hermetically sealed off from one another until now—hence, for the time being, unable to communicate.”

  “According to Procians!” someone put in. I didn’t recognize the oddly accented voice, so I thought it might be the Matarrhite.

  “The purpose of this messal, accordingly, is to develop and, I would hope, implement a strategy for the Saecular Power, assisted by the avout, to break down the plurality—which is the same thing as developing a shared language. We shall put ourselves out of business by making the Plurality of Worlds into One World.”

  “He hates this messal,” I translated, “so he’s trying to talk Ignetha Foral into turning it into something else: which would just happen to be a power base for the Procians.”

  Suur Karvall really hated it when we talked over the doyns, but she was going to have to get used to it. We were all standing around distributing the greens among half a dozen salad plates. Only six, because Matarrhites, apparently, didn’t eat salad.

  While making dinner, some of us servitors had had a good argument as to why a Matarrhite had been invited. One theory was simply that, because the Saecular Power was religious, they wanted some Deolaters in on the discussion. The Matarrhites were going to have Convox clout way out of proportion to their significance in the mathic world, or so this argument went, because the Panjandrums felt more comfortable with them. The other theory was more in line with the notion, just voiced by Ignetha Foral, that this messal was a dumping ground.

  Clanking sounds over the speaker told us that those servitors who were still in the messallan were collecting the soup bowls. This led to a break in the dialog; but we could hear an elderly woman’s voice, speaking up, in a more informal mood, as the servitors worked: “I believe I can put your fears to rest, Fraa Lodoghir.”

  “Why, that’s good of you, Grandsuur Moyra, but I don’t remember voicing any fears!” said Fraa Lodoghir, trying and failing to sound jovial.

  Moyra was Karvall’s doyn, so, out of respect for Karvall, we actually did shut up for a moment.

  Moyra returned, “I believe you did express concern that the Geometers had contaminated their own culture by watching too many of our speelies.”

  “Of course you are right! That’s what I get for contradicting a Lorite!” Fraa Lodoghir said.

  The door opened and in came Barb with seven bowls stacked on his arms.

  “I think you ought to change my designation,” said Moyra delicately, after considering this for a moment, “and now call me a meta-Lorite, or, in honor of this occasion, a Plurality of Worlds Lorite.”

  This got a murmur out of everyone—in the messallan and in the kitchen. Suur Karvall had drifted over to the speaker and was standing there rapt. Arsibalt had been chopping something; he stopped and poised his knife above the block.

  “We Lorites are always making nuisances of ourselves,” Moyra said, “by pointing out that this or that idea was already come up with by someone else, long ago. But now I do believe we shall have to broaden our sphere to include the Plurality of Worlds, and say ‘I’m terribly sorry, Fraa Lodoghir, but your idea was actually dreamed up by a bug-eyed monster on Planet Zarzax ten million years ago!’”

  Laughter around the table.

  “Splendid!” Arsibalt said. He turned and looked at me.

  “She’s a closet Halikaarnian,” I said.

  “Exactly!”

  Fraa Lodoghir had seen the same thing and was trying to lodge an objection: “I’d say you can’t know such a thing until you communicate with that bug-eyed monster or his descendants…” And then he went on to reiterate what he’d said before. I rushed the salad out in the hopes that it would shut him up. Suur Moyra didn’t
seem quite taken with his arguments, and Ignetha Foral was beginning to look a little frosted.

  Meanwhile, Arsibalt’s doyn, who happened to be seated next to Fraa Jad, was leaning to exchange whispers with the Thousander. When first I’d seen this man, he’d struck me as oddly familiar. Only when Arsibalt told me his name had I realized where I’d seen him before: standing alone in the chancel of Saunt Edhar, looking straight up at me. This was Fraa Paphlagon.

  Fraa Jad nodded. Paphlagon cleared his throat as Lodoghir began to wind down, and finally barged in: “Perhaps while we’re proving that everything Saunt Proc ever wrote was just perfect, we can get some theorics done too!”

  This shut even Lodoghir up, so there was a short pause. Paphlagon continued, “There’s another reason for having a messal about the Plurality of Worlds: a reason that some would say is almost as fascinating as Fraa Lodoghir’s remarks about syntax. It is a pure theorical reason. It is that the Geometers are made of different matter from us. Matter that is not native to this cosmos. And what is more, we have results just in from Laboratorium, concerning the tests that were performed on the four vials of fluid—assumed to be blood—on the Ecba probe. These four samples are made of different matter from each other, which is to say that each of them is as different from the other three, as it is from the matter we are made of.”

  “Fraa Paphlagon, I was only made aware of this as I was en route. I’m still absorbing it,” said Ignetha Foral. “Say more, please, of what you mean when you speak of the matter being different?”

  “The nuclei of the atoms are incompatible,” he said. Then, surveying the faces at the table, he shifted back in his chair, grinned, and held up his hands like parallel blades, as if to say “imagine a nucleus.” “Nuclei are forged in the hearts of stars. When the stars die, they explode, and the nuclei are thrown out as ash from a dead fire. These nuclei are positively charged. So, when things get cool enough, they attract electrons, and become atoms. Further cooling enables the atoms’ electrons to interact with one another to form complexes called molecules, which are what everything is made of. But, again, the making of the world begins in the hearts of stars, where those nuclei are forged according to certain rules that only apply in very hot crowded places. The chemistry of the stuff we are made of reflects, in a roundabout way, those rules. Until we learned to make newmatter, every nucleus in our cosmos was made according to the set of rules that naturally obtains. But the Geometers are aware of—they are made of—four other slightly different, but totally incompatible, sets of rules for making nuclei.”