Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  “I think that we could all tell similar stories,” I pointed out.

  She shrugged, nodded, started to eat.

  “Well,” I tried, “tell me about your current life, then.”

  She looked at me, a little too long for comfort. “Lio told me that you spoke.”

  “Yes.”

  She finally broke eye contact, let her gaze wander over the breakfast tables, slowly filling up with weary fraas and suurs, and out over the lawns and towers of Tredegarh. “They brought me here to organize people. So that’s what I’ve been doing.”

  “But not in the way they wanted?”

  She shook her head quickly. “It’s more complicated than that, Erasmas.” It killed me to hear her speak my name. “Turns out that once you get an organization started, it takes on a life—lives by a logic—of its own. I suppose if I’d ever done this before, I’d have known it would be that way—would have planned for it.”

  “Well—don’t beat yourself up.”

  “I’m not beating myself up. That’s you putting emotions on me. Like clothes on a doll.”

  The old feeling—a curious mix of irritation, love, and desire to feel more of it—came over me.

  “See, they knew from the start that the Convox was vulnerable. An obvious target, if the pact opened hostilities.”

  “The pact?”

  “We call it PAQD now for Pangee-Antarct-Quator-Diasp. Less anthropomorphic than Geometers.”

  But they are anthropomorphic, I was tempted to say. But I stifled it.

  “I know,” she said, eyeing me, “they are anthropomorphic. Never mind. We call them the PAQD.”

  “Well, I had been wondering,” I said. “Seems risky to put all the smart people in one square mile.”

  “Yeah, but what they have drilled into me, over and over, is that it’s all about risk. The question is, what are the benefits that might be had in exchange for a given risk?”

  To me this sounded like the kind of organizational bulshytt that was always being spouted by pompous extras who hadn’t bothered to define their terms. But it seemed weirdly important to Ala that I listen, understand, and agree. She even reached out and put her hand on mine for a few moments, which focused my attention. So I went through a little pantomime of processing what she’d said and agreeing to it. “The benefit, here, being that maybe the Convox could do something halfway useful before it got blown up?” I asked.

  That seemed to pass muster, so she plowed ahead. “I was assigned to risk mitigation, which is bulshytt meaning that if the PAQD does anything scary, this Convox is going to scatter like a bunch of flies when they see the flyswatter. And instead of scattering randomly, we are going to do it in a systematic, planned way—the Antiswarm, the Ita have been calling it—and we are going to stay on the Reticulum so that we can continue the essential functions of the Convox even as we are scurrying all over the place.”

  “Did you start on this right away? Just after you got Evoked?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you knew from the outset that there was going to be a Convox.”

  She shook her head. “I knew they—we—were laying plans for one. I didn’t know for sure it would actually happen—or who would be called. When it started to materialize, these plans that I’d been making came into sharper focus, took on depth. And then it became obvious to me—was unavoidable.”

  “What became obvious?”

  “What did Fraa Corlandin teach us of the Rebirth?”

  I shrugged. “You studied harder than I. The end of the Old Mathic Age. The gates of the old maths flung open—torn off their hinges, in some cases. The avout dispersed into the Saeculum—okay, I think I see where this is going now…”

  “What the Saecular Power had asked me to lay plans for—without understanding—was in many ways indistinguishable from a second Rebirth,” Ala said. “Because, Raz, not only Tredegarh would open its gates. If it comes to war with the PAQD, all of the concents will have to disperse. The avout will move among—mingle with—blend into the general population. Yet we’ll still be talking to one another over the Reticulum. Which means—”

  “Ita,” I said.

  She nodded, and smiled, warming to the task, to the picture she was building. “Each cell of wandering avout has to include some Ita. And it won’t be possible to maintain avout/Ita segregation any more. The Antiswarm will have tasks to carry out—not the kinds of things avout have traditionally done. Work of immediate Saecular relevance.”

  “A second Praxic Age,” I said.

  “Exactly!” She’d become enthusiastic. I felt the excitement too. But I drew back from it, recollecting that it could only come to pass if we got into out-and-out war. She sensed this too, and clamped her face down into the kind of expression I imagined she wore when sitting in council with high military leaders. “It started,” she said, in a much lower voice—and by it I knew she meant the thing Lio had told me of—“it started in meetings with cell leaders. See, the cells—the groups we’re going to break into, if we trigger the Antiswarm—each has a leader. I’ve been meeting with those leaders, giving them their evacuation plans, familiarizing them with who’s in their cells.”

  “So that’s—”

  “Preordained. Yes. Everyone in the Convox has already been assigned to a cell.”

  “But I haven’t—”

  “You haven’t been informed,” Ala said. “No one has—except for the cell leaders.”

  “You didn’t want to upset people—distract them—there was no point in letting them know,” I guessed.

  “Which is about to change,” she said, and looked around as if expecting it to change now. And indeed I noticed that several more military drummons had pulled onto the grounds and parked at one end of this open-air Refectory. Soldiers were setting up a sound system. “That’s why we’re all eating together.” She snorted. “That’s why I’m eating at all. First meal worthy of the name I’ve had in three days. Now I get to relax for a little—let things play out.”

  “What’s going to happen?”

  “Everyone’s going to receive a pack, and instructions.”

  “It can’t be random that we’re doing this out of doors under a clear sky,” I observed.

  “Now you’re thinking like Lio,” she said approvingly, through a bite of bread. She swallowed and went on, “This is a deterrence strategy. The PAQD will see what we’re up to and, it is hoped, guess that we’re making preparations to disperse. And if they know that we are ready to disperse at a moment’s notice, they’ll have less incentive to attack Tredegarh.”

  “Makes sense,” I said. “I guess I’ll have many more questions about that in a minute. But you were saying something about the meetings with the cell leaders—?”

  “Yes. You know how it is with avout. Nothing gets taken at face value. Everything is peeled back. Dialoged. I was meeting with these people in small groups—half a dozen cell leaders at a time. Explaining their powers and responsibilities, role-playing different scenarios. And it seemed as though every group had one or two who wanted to take it further than the others. To put it in bigger historical perspective, draw comparisons to the Rebirth, and so on. The thing that Lio told you about was an outgrowth of that. Some of these people—I simply couldn’t answer all of their questions in the time allotted. So I put their names on a list and told them, ‘Later we’ll have a follow-up meeting to discuss your concerns, but it’ll have to be a Lucub because I have no time otherwise.’ And the timing just happened—and you can consider this lucky or unlucky, as you like—to coincide with the Visitation of Orithena.”

  We were distracted now, as the sound system came alive. A hierarch asked for “the following persons” to come to the front—to approach the trucks, where soldiers were breaking open pallet-loads of military rucksacks, prepacked and bulging. The hierarch had obviously never spoken into a sound amplification device before, but soon enough she got the hang of it and began to call out the names of fraas and suurs. Slowly, uncertainly a
t first, those who’d been called began to get up from their seats and move up the lanes between tables. Conversation paused for a little while, then resumed in an altogether different tone, as people began to exclaim about it, and to speculate.

  “Okay,” I said, “so here you are in a Lucub, in a chalk hall somewhere with all of the pickiest, most obstreperous cell leaders—”

  “Who are wonderful, by the way!” Ala put in.

  “I can imagine,” I said. “But they are all wanting to go deep on these topics—at the same moment you are getting news of that poor woman from Antarct who sacrificed her life—”

  “And of what Orolo did for her,” she reminded me. And here she had to stop talking for a few moments, because grief had overtaken her in an unwary moment. We watched, or pretended to watch, avout coming back to their seats, each with a rucksack slung over one shoulder and a sort of badge or flasher hanging around the neck.

  “Anyway,” she said, and paused to clear her throat, which had gone husky. “It was the strangest thing I’d ever seen. I’d expected we’d talk until dawn, and never arrive at a consensus. But it was the opposite of that. We walked in with a consensus. Everyone just knew that we had to make contact with whatever faction had sent that woman down. And that even if the Saeculars wouldn’t allow such a thing, well, once we had turned into the Antiswarm—”

  “What could they do to stop us?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Lio said something about using the guidestar lasers on the big telescopes to send signals?”

  “Yes. It’s being talked about. Some might even be doing it for all I know.”

  “Whose idea was that?”

  She balked.

  “Don’t get me wrong!” I assured her. “It’s a brilliant idea.”

  “It was Orolo’s idea.”

  “But you couldn’t have talked to him—!”

  “Orolo actually did it,” Ala said, reluctantly, watching me closely to see how I’d react. “From Edhar. Last year. One of Sammann’s colleagues went up to the M & M and found the evidence.”

  “Evidence?”

  “Orolo had programmed the guidestar laser on the M & M to sweep out an analemma in the sky.”

  A week or a month ago, I’d have denied it could possibly be true. But not now. “So Lodoghir was right,” I sighed. “What he accused Orolo of, at the Plenary, was dead on.”

  “Either that,” Ala said, “or he changed the past.”

  I didn’t laugh.

  She continued, “You should know, too, that Lodoghir is one of this group I’ve been telling you about.”

  “Fraa Erasmas of Edhar,” called the voice on the speaker.

  “Well,” I said, “I guess I’d better go find out which cell you put me in.”

  She shook her head. “It’s not like that. You won’t know that until it’s time.”

  “How can we meet up with our cell if we don’t know who to look for?”

  “If it happens—if the order goes out—your badge will come alive, and tell you where to go. When you get there,” Ala said, “the other people you will see, are the rest of your cell.”

  I shrugged. “Seems sensible enough.” Because she had suddenly become somber, and I couldn’t guess why. She lunged across the table and grabbed my hand. “Look at me,” she said. “Look at me.”

  When I looked at her I saw tears in her eyes, and a look on her face unlike any I’d ever seen before. Perhaps it was the same way my face had looked when I had gazed down out of the open door of the aerocraft and recognized Orolo. She was telling me something with that face that she did not have power to put in words. “When you come back to this table, I’ll be gone,” she said. “If I don’t see you again before it happens”—and I sensed this was a certainty in her mind—“you have to know I made a terrible decision.”

  “Well, we all do, Ala! I should tell you about some of my recent terrible decisions!”

  But she was already shaking me off, willing me to understand her words.

  “Isn’t there any way to change your mind? Fix it? Make amends?” I asked.

  “No! I mean, I made a terrible decision in the way that Orolo made a terrible decision before the gates of Orithena.”

  It took me a few moments to see it. “Terrible,” I said at last, “but right.”

  Then the tears came so hard she had to close her eyes and turn her back on me. She let go my hand and began to totter away, shoulders hunched as if she’d just been stabbed in the back. She seemed the smallest person in the Convox. Every instinct told me to run after her, put an arm around her bony shoulders. But I knew she’d break a chair over my head.

  I walked up to the truck and got my rucksack and my badge: a rectangular slab, like a small photomnemonic tablet that had been blanked.

  Then I went back to work estimating the inertia tensor of the Geometers’ ship.

  I slept most of the afternoon and woke up feeling terrible. Just when my body had adjusted to local time, I had messed it up by keeping odd hours.

  I went early to Avrachon’s Dowment. This evening’s recipe called for a lot of peeling and chopping, so I brought a knife and cutting board around to the front veranda and worked there, partly to enjoy the last of the sunlight, but also partly in hopes I might intercept Fraa Jad on his way to messal. Avrachon’s Dowment was a big stone house, not quite so fortress-like as some Mathic structures I could name, with balconies, cupolas and bow windows that made me wish I could be a member of it, just so that I could do my daily work in such charming and picturesque surrounds. As if the architect’s sole objective had been to ignite envy in the hearts of avout, so that they’d scheme and maneuver to get into the place. I was fortunate that such an exceptional chain of events had made it possible for me even to sit on its veranda for an hour peeling vegetables. My conversation with Ala had reminded me that I had better take advantage of the opportunity while I could. The Dowment was situated on a knoll, so I had a good view over open lawns that rambled among other dowments and chapterhouses. Groups of avout came and went, some talking excitedly, some silent, hunched over, exhausted. Fraas and suurs were strewn at random over the grounds, wrapped in their bolts, pillowed on their spheres, sleeping. To see so many, clothed in such varied styles, reminded me again of the diversity of the mathic world—a thing I’d never been aware of, until I’d come here—and cast Ala’s talk of a Second Rebirth in a different light. The idea of tearing the gates off the hinges was thrilling in a way, simply because it represented such a big change. But would it mean the end of all that the avout had built, in 3700 years? Would people in the future look with awe at empty Mynsters and think that we must have been crazy to walk away from such places?

  I wondered who else might be assigned to my cell, and what tasks we might be assigned by those in charge of the Antiswarm. A reasonable guess was that I’d simply be with my new Laboratorium group, and that we’d go on doing the same sorts of things. Living in rooms in a casino in some random city, toiling over diagrams of the ship, eating Saecular food brought up by illiterate servants in uniforms. The group included two impressive theors, one from Baritoe and one from a concent on the Sea of Seas. The others were tedious company and I didn’t especially relish the idea of being sent on the road with them.

  Occasionally I would glimpse one of the Ringing Vale contingent and my heart would beat a little faster as I imagined what it would be like to be in a cell with them! Rank fantasy, of course—I would be worse than useless in such company—but fun to daydream about. No telling what such a cell would be ordered to do. But it would certainly be more interesting than guessing inertia tensors. Probably something incredibly dangerous. So perhaps it was for the best that they were out of my league.

  Or—in a similar yet very different vein—what would Fraa Jad’s cell look like, and what sorts of tasks would they be assigned? How privileged I’d been, in retrospect, to have traveled in a Thousander’s company for a couple of days! As far as I’d been able to make out, he was the only
Millenarian in the Convox.

  I’d settle for being in a cell with at least one of the old clock-winding team from Edhar. Yet I doubted that this would be the case. Ala was quite obviously troubled by some aspect of the decisions she had made regarding cell assignments, and though I could not know just what was eating at her so, it did serve as a warning that I should not lull myself into imagining a happy time on the road with old friends. The respect—I was tempted to call it awe—with which we Edharians were viewed by many at the Convox made it unlikely that several of us would be concentrated in one cell. They would spread us out among as many cells as possible. We would be leaders, and lonely in the same way Ala was.

  Fraa Jad approached from the direction of the Precipice. I wondered if they had given him a billet up on top, in the Thousanders’ math. If so, he must be spending a lot of time negotiating stairs. He recognized me from a distance and strolled right up.

  “I found Orolo,” I said, though of course Jad already knew this. He nodded.

  “It is unfortunate—what happened,” he said. “Orolo would have passed through the Labyrinths in due time, and become my fraa on the Crag, and it would have been good to work by his side, drink his wine, share his thoughts.”

  “His wine was terrible,” I said.

  “Share his thoughts, then.”

  “He seemed to understand quite a lot,” I said. And I wanted to ask how—had he deciphered coded messages in the Thousanders’ chants? But I didn’t want to make a fool of myself. “He thinks—he thought—that you have developed a praxis. I can’t help but imagine that this accounts for your great age.”