Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  “I’d be happy if you wanted to accompany me to Lucub,” I told Emman—and I meant it. “But you have to understand that I can’t guarantee—”

  I was drowned out by indignant shushing from Arsibalt and Karvall.

  Barb turned to me and announced: “They want you to be quiet, because they want to hear what is being said in the—”

  I shushed Barb. Arsibalt shushed me. Karvall shushed him.

  The topic seemed to have turned to the crux of the whole evening’s discussion: how the idea of worldtracks and configuration space were related to the existence of different kinds of matter on “Pangee,” “Diasp,” “Antarct,” “Quator,” and Arbre.

  “It was a strong meme, around the time of the Reconstitution,” Moyra was saying, “that the constants of nature are contingent—not necessary. That is, they could have been otherwise, had the early history of the universe been somehow different. As a matter of fact, research into such ideas is how we got newmatter in the first place.”

  “So, if I’m following you,” Ignetha Foral said, “the correctness of that idea—that those numbers are contingent—was proved. Proved by our ability to make newmatter.”

  “That is the usual interpretation,” said Moyra.

  “When you speak of ‘early history of the universe,’” put in Lodoghir, “how early—”

  “We are speaking of an infinitesimal snatch of time just after the Big Bang,” Moyra said, “when the first elementary particles congealed out of a sea of energy.”

  “And the claim is, it happened to congeal in a particular way,” Lodoghir said, “but it could have congealed a little differently—leading to a cosmos with different constants and different matter.”

  “Exactly,” said Moyra.

  “How can we translate what’s just been said into the language that Fraa Jad prefers, of Narratives in configuration space?” asked Ignetha Foral.

  “I’ll take a crack at it,” said Paphlagon. “If we traced our worldtrack—the series of points through configuration space that is the past, present, and future of our cosmos—backwards in time, we would observe configurations that were hotter and brighter, more closely packed—like running a photomnemonic tablet of an explosion in reverse. It would lead us into regions of Hemn space scarcely recognizable as a cosmos at all: the moments just after the Big Bang. At some point, proceeding backwards, we’d get to a configuration in which the physical constants we’ve been speaking of—”

  “Those twenty numbers,” said Suur Asquin.

  “Yes, were not even defined. A place so different that those constants would be meaningless—they would have no value, because they still had the freedom to take on any value. Now, up until this point in the story I’m telling you, there really is no difference between the old one-universe picture, and the worldtrack-through-Hemn space picture.”

  “Not even when newmatter is taken into account?” asked Lodoghir.

  “Not even then, because all the newmatter makers did was to build a machine that could create energies that high, and then make their own little Big Bangs in the lab. But what is new to us now, as of this morning’s Laboratorium findings, is that if you, in the same manner, traced the worldtracks of Antarct, of Pangee, Diasp, and Quator backwards, you would find yourself in a very similar part of Hemn space.”

  “The Narratives converge,” said Fraa Jad.

  “As you go backwards, you mean,” Zh’vaern said.

  “There is no backwards,” said Fraa Jad.

  This occasioned a few moments of silence.

  “Fraa Jad doesn’t believe in the existence of time,” Moyra said; but she sounded as if she were realizing it and saying it at the same moment.

  “Ah, well! Important detail, that,” said Suur Tris, in the kitchen, and for once no one shushed her. For some minutes, we’d all been standing around a set of dessert plates, ready to serve, waiting for the right moment.

  “I don’t recommend we get sidetracked on the question of whether time exists,” said Paphlagon, to the almost audible relief of everyone else. “The point is that in that model that views the five cosmi—Arbre, and those of the four Geometer races—as trajectories in Hemn space, those trajectories are extremely close together in the vicinity of the Big Bang. And we might even ask whether they were the same up to a certain point, when something happened that made them split off from one another. Perhaps that is a question for another messal. Perhaps only Deolaters would dare to attempt it.” In the kitchen, we risked glancing at Zh’vaern’s servitor. “In any case, the different worldtracks ended up with slightly different physical constants. And so you could say that even if we were to sit in a room with a Geometer who seemed similar to us, the fact is that they would carry in the very nuclei of their atoms a sort of fingerprint that proved they came from a different Narrative.”

  “As our genetic sequences carry a record of every mutation, every adaptation, every ancestor to the first thing that ever lived,” said Suur Moyra, “so the stuff of which they were made would encode what Fraa Jad calls the Narrative of their cosmos, back to the point in Hemn space when we all diverged.”

  “Farther,” Fraa Jad said. Which was followed by the customary silence that followed most Jad-statements; but it was shattered, this time, by a laugh from Lodoghir.

  “Ah, I see it! Finally! Oh, what a fool I’ve been, Fraa Jad, not to notice the game you’ve been playing. But now at last I see where you have been leading us, ever so subtly: to the Hylaean Theoric World!”

  “Hmm, I don’t know which is more annoying,” I said, “Lodoghir’s tone, or the fact that he figured this out before I did.”

  I’d been shocked, a few hours ago, when Lodoghir had wandered up to me during Periklyne and begun chit-chatting about our encounter on the Plenary stage. How could he come anywhere near me without body armor and a team of stun-gun-brandishing Inquisitors? How could he not have foreseen that I’d devote the rest of my life to plotting violent revenge? Which had forced me to understand that it really wasn’t personal, for him: all the rhetorical tricks, the distortions, salted with outright lies, the appeals to emotion, were every bit as much parts of his tool kit as equations and syllogisms were of mine, and he didn’t imagine I’d really object, any more than Jesry would if I pointed out an error in his theorics.

  I had stared dumbly at Lodoghir throughout, judging the distance separating my knuckles and his teeth. I had had the vague idea that he was bossing me around a little, concerning this evening’s messal, but I hadn’t heard any of it. After a while he had lost interest, since I hadn’t said a word, and had wandered off.

  “I don’t know how I’m going to make it through this, between him, and the Inquisition!” I said.

  “You’re already in trouble with the Inquisition?” Arsibalt asked, sounding amazed and appreciative at the same time.

  “No—but Varax let me know he’s watching me,” I said.

  “How in the world did he do that?”

  “Earlier, I had a really annoying encounter with Lodoghir.”

  “Yes. I saw it.”

  “No, I mean I had a second one. And a few seconds later, guess who walked up to me?”

  “Well, given the context in which you are telling the story,” Arsibalt said, “I would have to guess it was Varax.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What did Varax say?”

  “He said, ‘I understand you’re up to Chapter Five! Hope it didn’t ruin your whole autumn.’ And I told him that it had taken me a few weeks but I didn’t blame him for what had happened.”

  “That was all?”

  “Yeah. Maybe some chitchat afterwards.”

  “And how do you interpret these words of Varax?”

  “He was saying ‘don’t pop your doyn in the nose, young man—I’m watching you.’”

  “You’re an idiot.”

  “What!?”

  “You got it all wrong! This was a gift!”

  “A gift!?”

  Arsibalt explained: “A d
oyn has the power to discipline his servitor by assigning chapters in the Book. But you, Raz, hardened criminal that you are, are already up to Five. Lodoghir would have to give you Six: a very heavy punishment—”

  “Which I could appeal,” I said, getting it, “appeal to the Inquisition.”

  “Arsibalt’s right,” said Tris, who’d been listening (and who seemed to be looking at me in a whole new way, now that she knew I was up to Five). “It sounds to me like this Varax was giving you a big fat hint that the Inquisition would throw out any sentence from Lodoghir.”

  “They would almost have to,” said Arsibalt.

  I picked up Lodoghir’s dessert and headed for the messallan in a whole new mood. The others followed me. We came into a room of flushed faces and bitten lips: a tableau of strained and awkward body language. Lodoghir had been having his usual effect on people.

  “Just when I’d thought we were getting somewhere,” Ignetha Foral was saying, “I see that once again the messal has been sidetracked into some old and tedious dispute between Procians and Halikaarnians. Metatheorics! Sometimes I wonder whether you in the mathic world really understand the stakes that are now in play.”

  Clearly I had come in at the wrong moment. But it was too late now, and others were piling up behind me, so I barged on in and gave my doyn his dessert just as he was saying, “I accept your rebuke, Madame Secretary, and I assure you that—”

  “I don’t accept it,” said Fraa Jad.

  “Nor should you!” put in Zh’vaern.

  “These matters are important whether or not you take the trouble to understand them,” Fraa Jad went on.

  “How am I to distinguish this from the partisan bickering that goes on in the capital?” Ignetha Foral asked. Others at the table had been horrified by Fraa Jad’s tone, but she seemed to find it bracing.

  Fraa Jad ignored the question—it was none of his concern—and turned his energies to his dessert. Fraa Zh’vaern—who was surprising us all with his interest in the topic—took it up. “By examining the quality of the arguments.”

  “When the arguments come out of pure theorics, I am unable to make such judgments!” she pointed out.

  “I would not assume that the existence of the Hylaean Theoric World comes out of what is called pure theorics,” Lodoghir said. “It is as much a leap of faith as believing in God.”

  “As much as I admire the ingenuity with which you find a way to skewer Fraa Jad and Fraa Zh’vaern with the same sentence,” said Ignetha Foral, “I must remind you that most of the people I work with believe in God, and so, among them, your gambit is likely to backfire.”

  “The hour is late,” Suur Asquin pointed out—though no one seemed tired. “I propose that we take up the topic of the Hylaean Theoric World in tomorrow evening’s messal.”

  Fraa Jad nodded, but it was hard to tell whether he was accepting the challenge, or really enjoying the cake.

  * * *

  Everything Killer: a weapons system of unusual praxic sophistication, thought to have been used to devastating effect in the Terrible Events. The belief is widely held, but unproved, that the complicity of theors in the development of this praxis led to universal agreement that they should henceforth be segregated from non-theorical society, a policy that when effected became synonymous with the Reconstitution.

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

  “Have you all been enjoying your books?” Suur Moyra inquired, then seized a pan and began scraping dead vegetables into the compost. Karvall gasped—Moyra had sneaked in and ambushed us. She dropped the pot she’d been scrubbing, spun away from the sink, and ran over to take the pan out of her old doyn’s frail hands. Arsibalt and I turned almost as adroitly to watch. Karvall might be swathed in a ton of black bolt, but, as we’d been noticing, the lashings that held it in place around her body were most intricate, and rewarded close examination. Even Barb looked. Emman Beldo was driving Ignetha Foral back to her lodgings. Zh’vaern’s servitor, Orhan, was a hard man or woman to read with his or her head totally covered, but the wrinkles in his or her bolt told me his or her head was tracking Karvall. Tris took advantage of this to steal the best scrub-brush.

  “Were you responsible for the books?” I asked.

  “I had Karvall place them in your trailer,” Moyra said, and gave me a smile.

  “So that’s where those came from,” Tris said, then explained, “I found a stack of books in my cell this morning.” From the way other servitors were now looking at Moyra, I guessed they’d had similar experiences.

  “Wait a minute, that is chronologically impossible!” Barb pointed out, and then, showing a flash of the old Barb wit, added, “Unless you violated the rules of causality!”

  “Oh, I’ve been trying to get this messal started for a few days,” Moyra said. “Just ask Suur Asquin, she’ll tell you what a pest I’ve made of myself. You don’t really think something like this could be thrown together by a bunch of hierarchs passing notes around during Inbrase, do you?”

  “Grandsuur Moyra,” Arsibalt began, “if it wasn’t this morning’s Laboratorium results that brought this messal into being, what was it?”

  “Well, if you weren’t too busy flirting with these lovely suurs and horsing around in the kitchen, you might have heard me earlier, speaking of being a meta-Lorite.”

  “Or a Plurality of Worlds Lorite,” I said.

  “Ah, so you were paying attention!”

  “I thought it was just an icebreaker.”

  “Who was their Evenedric, Fraa Arsibalt?”

  “I beg your pardon?” Arsibalt was fascinated by the question, but soon had his hands full as Suur Tris dumped a huge greasy platter into his arms.

  “Fraa Tavener, who was the Saunt Hemn on the planet of Quator? Tris, who was the Lady Baritoe of Antarct? Fraa Orhan, do they worship a God on Pangee, and is it the same as the God of the Matarrhites?”

  “It must be, Grandsuur Moyra!” Orhan exclaimed, and made a gesture with his hand (I had decided he had to be male) that I’d seen before. Some kind of Deolater superstition.

  “Fraa Erasmas, who discovered Halikaarn’s Diagonal on the world of Diasp?”

  “Because obviously they did think such thoughts, you’re saying…” Arsibalt said.

  “They must have done, to build that ship!” said Barb.

  “Your minds are so much fresher, more agile than some of those who sit in that messallan,” Moyra said. “I thought you might have ideas.”

  Suur Tris turned around and asked, “Are you saying that there would be one-to-one-correspondences between our Saunts and theirs? Like the same mind shared across multiple worlds?”

  “I’m asking you,” Moyra said.

  I had nothing to say, being stricken with the all-too-familiar feeling of unease that came over me, lately, when conversations began to wander down this path. The last words Orolo had spoken to me, a few minutes before he’d died, had been a warning that the Thousanders knew about this stuff, and had been developing a praxis around it: in effect, that the legends of the Incanters were based in fact. And perhaps I’d fallen back into my old habit of worrying too much; but it seemed to me, now, that every conversation I was part of came dangerously close to this topic.

  Arsibalt, unburdened by such cares, felt ready to have a go. He heaved the washed platter into a drying rack, wiped his hands on his bolt, and squared off. “Well. Any such hypothesis would have to be grounded in some account of why different minds in different worldtracks would think similar things. One could always look to a religious explanation,” he went on, with a glance at Orhan, “but other than that…well…”

  “You needn’t be reticent about your belief in the HTW—remember who you’re talking to! I’ve seen it all!”

  “Yes, Grandsuur Moyra,” Arsibalt said, with a dip of the head.

  “How might the knowledge propagate from a common Theoric World—I won’t call it Hylaean, since presumably there was no person named Hylaea on Quator—to the minds of diff
erent Saunts in different worlds? And is it still going on at this moment—between us, and them?” Moyra had been edging toward the back door as she tossed these mind bombs into the kitchen, and now almost collided with Emman Beldo, fresh in from escorting his doyn home.

  “Well, it sounds as though the messal will discuss that tomorrow,” I pointed out.

  “Why wait? Don’t be complacent!” Moyra shot back as she was storming out into the night. Karvall threw down a towel and scurried after her, drawing her bolt up over her head. Emman politely got out of her way, then swiveled to watch Karvall until there was nothing left to see. When he turned back around, he got a sponge in the face from Suur Tris.

  “You can’t just have these tracks wandering around in Hemn space—” said Emman.

  “The way we’re wandering around in the dark,” I proposed. For we were attempting to find a suitable Lucub.

  “With no rhyme or reason. Can you?”

  “You mean the worldtracks? The Narratives?”

  “I guess so—what is up with that, by the way?”

  It was a vague question but I could tell what was on his mind.

  “You mean, Fraa Jad’s use of the word Narrative?”