Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  “The destructive effects of radiation on living systems are traceable to interactions between individual particles—photons, neutrons—and molecules in the affected organism,” he pointed out.

  “Quantum events,” I said.

  “Yes, and so a cell that has just undergone a mutation, and one that has not, lie on Narratives that are separated by only a single forking in Hemn space.”

  “Aging,” I said, “is due to transcription errors in the sequences of dividing cells—which are also quantum-level events—”

  “Yes. It is not difficult to see how a plausible and internally consistent mythology could arise, according to which nuclear waste handlers invented a praxis to mend radiation damage, and later extended it to mitigate the effects of aging and so on.”

  And so on seemed to cover an awful lot of possibilities, but I thought better of pursuing this. “You’re aware,” I said, “of how explosive that mythology is, if it gains currency in the Saeculum?”

  He shrugged. The Saeculum was none of his concern. But the Convox was a different matter. “Some here want badly to see that mythology promoted to fact. It would give them comfort.”

  “Zh’vaern was asking some weird questions about it,” I said, and nodded at a procession of Matarrhites wafting across the lawn some distance away.

  It was a gambit. I hoped to bond with Fraa Jad by giving him an opening to agree with me that those people were weird and obnoxious. But he slid around it. “There is more to be learned from them than from any others at the Convox.”

  “Really?”

  “It would be impossible to pay too much attention to the cloaked ones.”

  Two Matarrhites detached themselves from the procession and set a course for Avrachon’s Dowment. I watched Zh’vaern and Orhan come towards us for a few moments, wondering what Jad saw in them, then turned back to the Thousander. But he had slipped inside.

  Zh’vaern and Orhan approached silently and entered the Dowment after greeting me, rather stiffly, on the veranda.

  Arsibalt and Barb were a hundred feet behind them.

  “Results?” I demanded.

  “A piece of the PAQD ship is missing!” Barb announced.

  “That structure you’ve been studying—”

  “It’s where the missing piece used to be attached!”

  “What do you think it was?”

  “The inter-cosmic transport drive, obviously!” Barb scoffed. “They didn’t want us to see it, because it’s top secret! So they parked it farther out in the solar system.”

  “How about your group, Arsibalt?”

  “That ship is patched together from subassemblies built in all four of the PAQD cosmi,” Arsibalt announced. “It is like an archaeological dig. The oldest part is from Pangee. Very little of it remains. There are only a very few odds and ends from Diasp. Most of the ship is made of material from the Antarct and Quator cosmi—of the two, we are fairly certain that Quator was visited more recently.”

  “Good stuff!” I said.

  “How about you—what results have been produced by your group, Raz?” Barb asked.

  I was collecting my things, getting ready to go inside. Arsibalt shuffled over to help me. “It sloshed,” I said.

  “Sloshed?”

  “When the Hedron made its spin move the other evening, the rotation wasn’t steady. It jiggled a little. We conclude that the spun part contains a large mass of standing water, and when you hit it with a sudden rotation, the water sloshes.” And I went off into a long riff about the higher harmonics of the sloshing, and what it all meant. Barb lost interest and went inside.

  “What were you discussing with Fraa Jad?” Arsibalt asked.

  I didn’t feel comfortable divulging the part of the talk that had been about praxis, so I answered—truthfully—“The Matarrhites. We’re supposed to keep an eye on them—learn from them.”

  “Do you suppose he wants us to spy on them?” Arsibalt asked, fascinated. This gave me the idea that Arsibalt wanted, for some reason, to spy on them, and was looking for Jad’s blessing.

  “He said it would be impossible to pay too much attention to the cloaked ones.”

  “Is that how he phrased it!?”

  “Pretty near.”

  “He said ‘cloaked ones,’ rather than ‘Matarrhites’?”

  “Yes.”

  “They’re not Matarrhites at all!” Arsibalt said in an excited whisper. “I’ll take that if you don’t mind,” I said. For in his eagerness to help, he had reached for my cutting board. I confiscated the knife.

  “You think I’m so profoundly insane that I can’t be trusted with sharp objects!” Arsibalt said, crestfallen.

  “Arsibalt! If they aren’t Matarrhites, what are they? Panjandrums in disguise?”

  He looked as if he were about to spill a great secret, but then Suur Tris came around, and he clammed up.

  “I’ll take your hypothesis under advisement,” I said, “and weigh it on the Steelyard against the alternative—which is that the Matarrhites are Matarrhites.”

  * * *

  Syntactic Faculties: Factions within the mathic world, in the years following the Reconstitution, generally claiming descent from Proc. So named because they believed that language, theorics, etc., were essentially games played with symbols devoid of semantic content. The idea is traceable to the ancient Sphenics, who were frequent opponents of Thelenes and Protas on the Periklyne.

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

  Fraa Lodoghir said, “We are on the third messal already. The first seemed to be about worldtracks in Hemn space as a way of understanding the physical universe. Which was unobjectionable to me, until it turned out to be a stalking horse for the Hylaean Theoric World. The second was a trip to the circus—except that instead of gawking at contortionists, jugglers, and prestidigitators, we marveled at the intellectual backflips, sword-swallowing, and misdirection in which devotees of the HTW must engage if they are not to be Thrown Back as a religious cult. That’s quite all right, it was good to get it out of our systems, and I commend the Edharian plurality here for having, as it were, laid their cards on the messal. Ha. But what may we now say about the matter at hand—which is, in case anyone has forgotten, the PAQD, their capabilities and intentions?”

  “Why do they look like us, for one thing?” asked Suur Asquin. “That is the question that my mind returns to over and over again.”

  “Thank you, Suur Asquin!” I exclaimed back in the kitchen. I was scattering bread crumbs over the top of a casserole. “I can’t believe how little attention has been paid to that minor detail.”

  “People simply don’t know what to make of it—have no idea where to begin,” said Suur Tris. And as if to confirm this, a welter of voices was coming through on the speaker. I hauled the oven door open and thrust the casserole in, arranging it on the center of a hand-forged iron rack. Fraa Lodoghir was going on about parallel evolution: how, on Arbre, physically similar but totally unrelated species had evolved to fill similar niches on different continents.

  “Your point is well taken, Fraa Lodoghir,” said Zh’vaern, “but I believe that the similarities are too close to be explained by parallel evolution. Why do the Geometers have five fingers, one of which is an opposable thumb? Why not seven fingers and two thumbs?”

  “Do you have some knowledge of the PAQD that has been withheld from the rest of us?” demanded Lodoghir. “What you say is true of the one specimen we have seen—the Antarct woman. The other three Geometer species might have seven fingers, for all we know.”

  “Of course, you are correct,” Zh’vaern said. “But the Antarct-Arbre correspondence, taken alone, seems too great to be accounted for by parallel evolution.”

  The point was argued all the way through the soup course. We servitors made our rounds, staggering and sidling through a messallan congested with rucksacks. For we had all been told that one should never let one’s rucksack out of sight—so that, even if the dispersal order were accompanied
by a power blackout, or some sort of disaster that filled the air with dust and smoke, one would be able to find it by touch. Since we servitors couldn’t very well carry them up and down the serving corridor, we’d bent the rules by leaving ours lined up along the corridor wall. The doyns kept theirs behind the chairs in the messallan, and flipped their badges back over their shoulders to eat.

  Ignetha Foral put a stop to the thumb-and-finger discourse with a glance at Suur Asquin, who silenced the room with another of her magisterial throat-clearings. “In the absence of further givens, the parallel-evolution hypothesis cannot be rationally evaluated.”

  “I agree,” said Lodoghir in a wistful tone.

  “The alternative hypothesis seems to be some sort of leakage of information through the Wick, if I have been taking up Fraa Paphlagon’s argument?”

  Fraa Paphlagon looked a bit uneasy. “The word leakage makes it sound like a malfunction. It is nothing of the kind—just normal flow or, if you will, percolation along the world-DAG.”

  “This percolation you speak of: until now, I fancied it was all theors seeing timeless truths about isosceles triangles,” Lodoghir said. “I oughtn’t to be surprised by the ever-escalating grandiosity of these claims, but aren’t you now asking us to believe something even more colossal? Correct me if I’m wrong: but did you just try to link percolation of information through the Wick to biological evolution?”

  An awkard pause.

  “You do believe in evolution, don’t you?” Lodoghir continued.

  “Yes, though it might have sounded strange to someone like Protas, who had frankly mystical pagan views about the HTW and so on,” said Paphlagon, “but any modern version of Protism must be reconcilable with long-established theories, not only of cosmography, but of evolution. However, I disagree with the polemical part of your statement, Fraa Lodoghir. It is not a larger claim, but a smaller, more reasonable one.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry! I thought that when you claimed more, it was a larger claim?”

  “I am only claiming what is reasonable. That—as you yourself pointed out during your Plenary with Fraa Erasmas—tends to be the smallest, in the sense of least complicated, claim. What I claim is that information moves through the Wick in a manner that is somehow analogous to how it moves from past to present. As it moves, one of the things that it does is to excite physically measurable changes in nerve tissue…”

  “That,” Suur Asquin said, just to clarify, “being the part where we see truths about cnoöns.”

  “Yes,” said Paphlagon, “whence we get the HTW and the theorical Protism that Fraa Lodoghir loves so well. But nerve tissue is just tissue, it is just matter obeying natural law. It is not magical or spiritual, no matter what you might think of my opinions on this.”

  “I am so relieved to hear you say so!” said Lodoghir. “I’ll have you in the Procian camp by the time Fraa Erasmas brings me my dessert!”

  Paphlagon held his tongue for a moment, dodging laughter, then went on. “I can’t believe all of what I just said without positing some non-mystical, theorically understandable mechanism by which the ‘more Hylaean’ worlds can cause physical changes in the ‘less Hylaean’ worlds that lie ‘downstream’ of them in the Wick. And I see no prima facie reason to assume that all those interactions have to do with isosceles triangles and that the only matter in the whole cosmos that is ever affected just happens to be nerve tissue in the brains of theors! Now that would be an ambitious claim, and a rather strange one!”

  “We agree on something!” said Lodoghir.

  “A much more economical claim, in the Gardan’s Steelyard sense, is that the mechanism—whatever it is—acts on any matter whether or not that matter is part of a living organism—or a theor! It’s just that there is an observational bias at work.”

  A couple of heads nodded.

  “Observational bias?” Zh’vaern asked.

  Suur Asquin turned to him and said, “Starlight falls on Arbre all the time—even at high noon—but we would never know of the stars’ existence if we slept all night.”

  “Yes,” Paphlagon said, “and just as the cosmographer can only see stars in a dark sky, we can only observe the Hylaean Flow when it manifests itself as perceptions of cnoöns in our conscious minds. Like starlight at noon, it is always present, always working, but only noticed and identified as something remarkable in the context of pure theorics.”

  “Er, since you Edharians are so adept at burying assertions in your speeches, let me clarify something,” Lodoghir said. “Did you just stake a claim that the Hylaean Flow is responsible for parallel evolution of Arbrans and Geometers?”

  “Yes,” said Paphlagon. “How’s that for a speech?”

  “Much more concise, thank you,” Lodoghir said. “But you still believe in evolution!”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, in that case, you must be saying that the Hylaean Flow has an effect on survival—or at least on the ability of specific organisms to propagate their sequences,” Lodoghir said. “Because that’s how we, and the Antarctans, ended up with five fingers, two nostrils, and all the rest.”

  “Fraa Lodoghir, you are doing my work for me!”

  “Someone has to do it. Fraa Paphlagon, what possible scenario could justify all of that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “The Visitation of Orithena was only ten days ago. Givens are still pouring in. You, Fraa Lodoghir, are now on the forefront of research into the next generation of Protism.”

  “I can’t tell you how uneasy that makes me feel—really, I’d rather eat what Fraa Zh’vaern is eating. What is that?”

  “At last Fraa Lodoghir asks a good question,” said Arsibalt. Emman had yanked us; a boilover demanded our attention. We both knew exactly what Lodoghir was talking about. It was sitting on the stove, and we had been nervously edging around it all evening long. Stewed hair with cubes of packing material and shards of exoskeleton, or something. The hair seemed to be a vegetable. But what was really troubling Lodoghir and the others at the messal was the explosive crunching of the exoskeletons, or whatever they might be, between Zh’vaern’s molars. We could actually hear these noises over the speaker.

  Arsibalt looked around, verifying that Emman and I were the only ones in the kitchen. “As a member of an ascetic, cloistered, contemplative order myself,” he said, “I probably ought not level such criticisms against the poor Matarrhites—”

  “Oh, go ahead!” Emman said. He was gamely trying to repair the ruptured casserole.

  “All right, since you insist!” said Arsibalt. Protecting his hand with a fold of his bolt, he lifted the lid from the stewpot to divulge a bubbling morass of expired weeds, laced with dangerous-looking carapaces. “I think it’s taking things just a little too far to selectively breed, over a period of millennia, foodstuffs that are offensive to all non-Matarrhites.”

  “I’ll bet it’s one of those not-as-bad-as-it-looks,-sounds,-feels, and-smells type of things,” I said, holding my breath and approaching the pot.

  “How much?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “How much do you bet?”

  “Are you suggesting we try it?”

  “I’m suggesting you try it.”

  “Why only me?”

  “Because you proposed the wager, and you are the theor.”

  “What does that make you?”

  “A scholar.”

  “So you’ll take notes of my symptoms? Design my stained glass window, after I’m dead?”

  “Yes, we’ll place it right there,” Arsibalt said, pointing to a smoke-hole in the wall, about the size of my hand.

  Emman had drifted closer. Karvall and Tris had come in from the messallan and were standing very close to each other, watching.

  Being watched by females changed everything. “What is the wager?” I said. “I am back down to three possessions.” And it was one of the oldest rules in the mathic world that we weren’t allowed to w
ager the bolt, chord, and sphere.

  “Winner doesn’t have to clean up tonight,” Arsibalt proposed.

  “Done,” I said. This was easy; all I had to do, to win the bet, was to claim it wasn’t that bad, and not throw up—at least, not in front of Arsibalt. And even if I lost, I got all kinds of childish satisfaction out of Tris’s and Karvall’s exquisitely horrified reactions as I fished something out of the pulp and put it in my mouth. It was a cube of (I guessed) some curd-like, fermented substance, tangled up in wilted fronds, flecked with a few crunchy shards. While I was pursuing the latter with my tongue, the fronds slipped halfway down my gullet and made me swallow convulsively. They dragged the cube down with them, like seaweed killing a swimmer. I had to do a bit of coughing and gagging to get the vegetable matter back up into my mouth where I could chew it decently. This added some drama to the proceedings and made it that much more entertaining to the others. I held up a hand, signaling that all was well, and took my time chewing what was left—didn’t want my innards slashed up by the sharp bits. Finally it all went down in a greasy, fibrous, thorny tangle. I put the odds at 60–40 that it wouldn’t be coming back up. “You know,” I claimed, “it’s not that much worse than just standing over the pot and wondering.”

  “What’s it taste like?” Tris asked.

  “Ever put your tongue across battery terminals?”

  “No, I’ve never even seen a battery.”

  “Mmm.”

  “Now, as to the wager—” Arsibalt said uncertainly.

  “Yes,” I said, “good luck with cleanup. Put your back into it when you are taking care of those casseroles, will you?”

  Before Arsibalt could argue the point, his bell rang. Tris and Karvall were laughing at the look on his face as he slunk out of the kitchen.

  In the messallan, the doyns had been asking Zh’vaern—much more circumspectly—about his food, but now Fraa Paphlagon took the bit in his teeth again: “Like cosmographers who sleep at day and work at night because that is when the stars can be seen, we are going to have to toil in the laboratory of consciousness, which is the only setting we know of where the effects of the Hylaean Flow are observable.” And then he muttered something to Arsibalt. Then he added: “Though instead of one single HTW we should now speak of the Wick instead; the Flow percolates through a complex network of cosmi ‘more theoric than’ or ‘prior to’ ours.”