Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  We sat up to see a stocky figure in an antique bolt-and-chord getup, shambling toward us on weary legs.

  “Hello, Thistlehead!” I called out.

  “Feel like a stroll while we await massive retaliation?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “I’m going to bed,” Jesry said. I guessed he was lying. “No Lucub tonight.” Definitely lying.

  “Then I’m doing the same,” said Emman Beldo, who knew when he was being gotten rid of. “Lots of work tomorrow.”

  “If we still exist,” Jesry said.

  “I really have to get in touch with Ala,” I told Lio, after we had wandered for half an hour without saying a word. “I looked for her at Periklyne this afternoon but—”

  “She wasn’t there,” Lio said, “she was getting ready for this.”

  “You mean aiming the telescopes or—”

  “More the military side of it.”

  “How’d she get mixed up in that?”

  “She’s good. Someone noticed. The military gets what it asks for.”

  “How would you know? Are you mixed up in the military side too?”

  Lio was silent. We walked for a few minutes more. “A few days ago they put me in a new Laboratorium,” he said. I could tell that he’d been laboring to get it off his chest for a while.

  “Oh really? What have they got you doing?”

  “They dug up some old documents. Really old. We’ve been scraping them off. Getting familiar with them. Looking up old words, fallen from use.”

  “What kinds of documents?”

  “Technical drawings. Specs. Manuals. Back-of-envelope sketches, even.”

  “For what?”

  “They won’t just come out and say, and no one is allowed to see the whole picture,” Lio said, “but talking to some of the others, comparing notes in Lucub, taking into account the dates on the documents—just before the Terrible Events—we’re all pretty sure that what we are looking at are the original plans for the Everything Killers.”

  I gave a little snort of laughter, simply out of habit. The Everything Killers were only ever mentioned in the same way as we might talk of God or Hell. But everything about Lio’s tone and manner told me that he was being altogether literal. There was a long silence while I tried to absorb this news.

  In an attempt to prove that he must be mistaken, I pointed out, “But that goes against everything—everything—that the world is based on!” Meaning the post-Reconstitution world. “If they’re willing to do that, then nothing is real anymore.”

  “There are many who agree with you, of course,” Lio said, “and that’s why—” He exhaled, the breath coming out raggedly. “That’s why I wanted to invite you to be part of my Lucub.”

  “What’s the purpose of this Lucub?”

  “Some people are thinking of going over to the Antarcts.”

  “Going over—as in joining forces with? With the Geometers!?”

  “The Antarcts,” he insisted. “It’s been established, now, that the dead woman in the probe was from Antarct.”

  “Based on the blood samples in the tubes?”

  He nodded. “But the projectiles in her body are from the Pangee cosmos.”

  “So people are guessing that the Antarcts are on our side—”

  He nodded again. “And having some sort of conflict, up there, with the Pangees.”

  “So the idea is to forge an alliance between the avout, and the Antarcts?”

  “You got it,” Lio said.

  “Wow! How exactly would you go about that? How would you even communicate with them? I mean, so that the Saecular Power wouldn’t know of it.”

  “Easy. Already been worked out.” Then, knowing I’d never be satisfied with that, he added, “It’s the guidestar lasers on the big telescopes. We can aim them at the icosahedron. They’ll see the light but it can’t be intercepted by anyone who’s not right on the beam line.”

  I thought of the conversation I’d had with Lio months ago, when we had wondered whether it was really true, or just an old folk tale, that the Ita had us under continual surveillance. Idiotically, I looked around just in case any hidden microphones might somehow have popped into view. “Do the Ita—”

  “Some of them are in on it,” Lio said.

  “What kind of relationship exactly do these people want to forge with the Antarcts?”

  “We spend most of our time arguing about that. Too much time. There are some nut jobs, of course, who think we can go up there and live on their ship and it’ll be like ascending to Heaven. Most are more reasonable. We’ll set up our own communications to the Geometers and…conduct our own negotiations.”

  “But that is totally at odds with the Reconstitution!”

  “Does the Reconstitution say anything about aliens? About multiple cosmi?”

  I shut up, knowing when I was planed.

  “Anyway,” he went on.

  I completed his sentence. “The Reconstitution is a dead letter anyway if they are dusting off the Everything Killers.”

  “The term post-mathic is being thrown around,” Lio said. “People are talking about the Second Rebirth.”

  “Who’s in on it?”

  “Quite a few servitors. Not so many doyns, if you follow me.”

  “What orders? What maths?”

  “Well…the Ringing Vale avout consider the Everything Killers to be dishonorable, if that helps you.”

  “Where does this Lucub meet? It sounds huge.”

  “It’s a bunch of Lucubs. A network of cells. We talk to one another.”

  “What do you do, Lio?”

  “Stand in the back of the room and look tough. Listen.”

  “What are you listening for?”

  “There are some crazies,” he said. “Well, not crazy, but too rational, if you know what I mean. No awareness of tactics. Of discretion.”

  “And what are those people saying?”

  “That it’s time for the smart people to be in charge. Time to take the power back from people like the Warden of Heaven.”

  “That kind of talk could lead to a Fourth Sack!” I said.

  “Some people are way ahead of you,” Lio said. “They are saying, ‘Fine. Bring it on. The Geometers will intervene on our side.’”

  “That is just shockingly reckless,” I said.

  “That’s why I’m listening to those people,” Lio said, “and reporting back to my Lucub group, which seems reasonable by comparison.”

  “Why would the Geometers reach down to stop a Sack?”

  “People who believe this tend to be hard-core HTW types, I’m sorry to say. They’ve seen the Adrakhonic proof on Orolo’s phototype. They assume that the Geometers are our brothers. The fact that the Geometers made their first landfall at Orithena just confirms this.”

  “Lio, I have a question.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ve had zero contact with Ala. Jesry thinks it’s because she’s trying to get her liaisons sorted. But that doesn’t seem like her. Does she know anything about this group?”

  “She started it,” Lio said.

  * * *

  Sphenics: A school of theors well represented in ancient Ethras, where they were hired by well-to-do families as tutors for their children. In many classic Dialogs, seen in opposition to Thelenes, Protas, or others of their school. Their most prominent champion was Uraloabus, who in the Dialog of the same name was planed so badly by Thelenes that he committed suicide on the spot. They disputed the views of Protas and, broadly speaking, preferred to believe that theorics took place entirely between the ears, with no recourse to external realities such as the Protan forms. The forerunners of Saunt Proc, the Syntactic Faculties, and the Procians.

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

  Paphlagon’s plate was clean; Lodoghir hadn’t even picked up his fork. Hunger at last succeeded where throat-clearing, glares, exasperated sighs, and the en masse departure of the servitors had failed: Lodoghir fell silent, picked up
his glass, and doused his flaming vocal chords.

  Paphlagon was eerily calm—almost jolly. “If one were to examine a transcript of that, one would see an extraordinary, and quite lengthy, catalog of every rhetorical trick in the Sphenic book. We’ve seen appeals to mob sentiment: ‘no one believes in the HTW any more,’ ‘everyone thinks Protism is crazy.’ We’ve seen appeals to authority: ‘refuted in the Twenty-ninth Century by no less than Saunt So-and-so.’ Efforts to play on our personal insecurity: ‘how can any person of sound mind take this seriously?’ And many other techniques that I have forgotten the names of, as it has been so long since I studied the Sphenics. So. I must begin by applauding the rhetorical mastery that has given the rest of us an opportunity to enjoy this excellent meal and rest our voices. But I would be remiss if I did not point out that Fraa Lodoghir has yet to offer up a single argument, worthy of the name, against the proposition that there is a Hylaean Theoric World, that it is populated by mathematical entities—cnoöns, as we call them—that are non-spatial and non-temporal in nature, and that our minds have some capability of accessing them.”

  “Nor could I—ever!” exclaimed Fraa Lodoghir, whose jaw had been working at an astounding pace during the last few moments to get a bite of food squared away. “You Protists are ever so careful to frame the discussion so that it can’t be touched by rational debate. I can’t prove you’re wrong any more than I can prove the non-existence of God!”

  Paphlagon had some infighting skills of his own; he simply ignored what Lodoghir had just said. “A couple of weeks ago, at a Plenary, you and some of the other Procians floated the suggestion that the diagram of the Adrakhonic Theorem on the Geometers’ ship was a forgery, inserted into Saunt Orolo’s Phototype by Orolo himself, or someone else at Edhar. Do you now retract that allegation?” And Paphlagon glanced over his shoulder at an astoundingly high-resolution phototype of the Geometers’ ship, taken last night by the largest optical telescope on Arbre, on which the diagram was clearly visible. The walls of the messallan were papered with such. The table was scattered with more.

  “There is nothing wrong with mentioning hypotheses in the course of a discussion,” Lodoghir said. “Clearly that particular one happened to be incorrect.”

  “I think he just said ‘yes, I withdraw the allegation,’ said Tris, in the kitchen. I had gone back there ostensibly to fulfill my duties, but really to plow through heaps of more phototypes. Everyone in the Convox had been looking at them all day, but we weren’t even close to being tired of it.

  “It is such good fortune that this gambit worked,” Emman reflected, gazing fixedly at a grainy close-up of a strut.

  “You mean, that we did not get rodded?” Barb asked—sincerely.

  “No, that we got pictures,” Emman said. “Got them by doing something clever, here.”

  “Oh—you mean it is good fortune politically?” Karvall asked, a little uncertain.

  “Yes! Yes!” Emman exclaimed. “The Convox is expensive! It makes the Powers That Be happy when it yields discernible results.”

  “Why is it expensive?” Tris asked. “We grow our own food.”

  Emman finally looked up from his pictures. He was checking Tris’s face, in order to see whether she could possibly be serious.

  Over the speaker, Paphlagon was saying: “the Adrakhonic Theorem is true here. It’s apparently true in the four cosmi the Geometers came from. If their ship had turned up in some other cosmos, the same as ours, but devoid of sentient beings, would it be true there?”

  “Not until the Geometers arrived to say it was true,” said Lodoghir.

  Back in the kitchen, I intervened before Emman could blurt out anything he might have to apologize for. “It must be expensive for people like Emman and Ignetha Foral to keep tabs on it,” I pointed out.

  “Of course,” Emman said, “but even if you ignore that: there is a huge amount of mathic effort going into it. Thousands of avout working night and day. Saeculars don’t like wasted effort. That goes double for Saeculars who know a thing or two about management.”

  Management was a Fluccish word. Faces went blank around the kitchen. I stepped in to translate: “Just because the Panjandrums know how to run cheeseburg stands, they think they know how to run a Convox. Lots of people putting in time with no results makes them nervous.”

  “Oh, I see,” Tris said, uncertainly.

  “How funny!” Karvall said, and went back to work.

  Emman rolled his eyes.

  “I admit I am no theor,” Ignetha Foral was saying on the speaker, “but the more I hear of this, the less I understand your position, Fraa Lodoghir. Three is a prime number. It is prime today, was prime yesterday. A billion years ago, before there were brains to think about it, it was prime. And if all the brains were destroyed tomorrow, it would still be prime. Clearly its primeness has nothing to do with our brains.”

  “It has everything to do with our brains,” Lodoghir insisted, “because we supply the definition of what it is to be a prime number!”

  “No theor who attends to these matters can long escape the conclusion that the cnoöns exist independently of what may or may not be going on in peoples’ brains at any given moment,” Paphlagon said. “It is a simple application of the Steelyard. What is the simplest way of explaining the fact that theors working independently in different eras, different sub-disciplines, different cosmi even, time and time again prove the same results—results that do not contradict each other, even though reached by different proof-chains—results, some of which can be turned into theories that perfectly describe the behavior of the physical universe? The simplest answer is that the cnoöns really exist, and are not of this causal domain.”

  Arsibalt’s bell jingled. I decided to go in with him. We took down a huge rendering of the icosahedron that had been pinned to a tapestry behind Paphlagon. Karvall and Tris came out and helped take the tapestry down, exposing a wall of dark grey slate, and a basket of chalk. The dialog had turned to an exposition of Complex versus Simple Protism, and so Arsibalt was called upon to draw on that slate the same sorts of diagrams that Fraa Criscan had drawn in the dust of the road up Bly’s Butte when he had explained this topic to me and Lio some weeks earlier: the Freight Train, the Firing Squad, the Wick, and so on. I drifted back and forth between there and the kitchen as the exposition went on. Ignetha Foral had long been familiar with this material, but it was new to several of the others. Zh’vaern, in particular, asked several questions. Emman, for once, understood less of what was going on than his doyn, and so as he and I worked on garnishes for the desserts, I watched his face, and jumped in with little explanations when his eyes went out of focus.

  I returned to the messallan to clear plates just as Paphlagon was explaining the Wick: “A fully generalized Directed Acyclic Graph, with no distinction made any more between, on the one hand, so-called theoric worlds, and, on the other, inhabited ones such as Arbre, Quator, and the rest. For the first time, we have arrows leading away from the Arbran Causal Domain towards other inhabited worlds.”

  “Do you mean to suggest,” Lodoghir asked, as though not quite believing his ears, “that Arbre might be the Hylaean Theoric World of some other world that has people living on it?”

  “Of any number of such worlds,” Paphlagon said, “which might themselves be the HTWs of still other worlds.”

  “But how could we possibly verify such a hypothesis?” Lodoghir demanded.

  “We could not,” Jad admitted, in his first utterance of the whole evening, “unless those worlds came to us.”

  Lodoghir broke into rich laughter. “Fraa Jad! I commend you! What would this messal be without your punch lines? I don’t agree with a word of what you’re saying, but it does make for an entertaining—because completely unpredictable—mealtime!”

  I heard the first part of this in person, the back half over the speaker in the kitchen, to which I had repaired with an armload of plates. Emman was standing over the counter where we had spread out the pho
totypes, thumbing something into his jeejah. He ignored me, but he did glance up and fix his gaze on nothing in particular as Ignetha Foral began to speak: “The material is interesting, the explanation well carried off, but I am at a loss, now. Yesterday evening we were told one story about how Plurality of Worlds might be understood, and it had to do with Hemn space and worldtracks.”

  “Which I spent all day explaining to rooms full of bureaucrats,” Emman complained, with a theatrical yawn. “And now this!”

  “Now,” Ignetha Foral was saying, “we are hearing an altogether different account of it, which seems to have nothing to do with the first. I cannot help but wonder whether tomorrow’s Messal will bring another story, and the day after that, yet another.”

  This touched off a round of not very interesting conversation in the messallan. The servitors pounced and cleared. Arsibalt trudged to the kitchen and busied himself at the keg. “I’d best fortify myself,” he explained, to no one in particular, “as I am condemned to spend the remainder of the evening drawing light bubbles.”

  “What’s a light bubble?” Emman asked me quietly.

  “A diagram that shows how information—cause-and-effect—moves across space and time.”

  “Time, which doesn’t exist?” Emman said, repeating what had become a stock joke.

  “Yeah. But it’s okay. Space doesn’t exist either,” I said. Emman threw me a sharp look, and decided I must be pulling his leg.

  “So how’s your friend Lio doing?” Emman asked, apropos of yesterday evening. It was noteworthy that he remembered Lio’s name, since there had been no formal introduction, and little conversation. In the Convox, people met one another in myriad ways, though, so they might have crossed paths anywhere. I would not have given this a second thought if not for the substance of what Lio and I had talked about. Yesterday I’d felt easy around Emman. Today it was different. People I cared about were being drawn into—in Ala’s case, perhaps leading—a subversive movement. Lio was trying to draw me into it even as Emman wanted to follow me to Lucub. Could it be that the Saecular Power had got wind of it, and that Emman’s real mission was to ferret it out, using me as a way in? Not a very nice way to think—but that was the way I was going to have to think from now on.