Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  “We get those for free,” Paphlagon said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s already there in the model we’ve been talking about, we don’t have to add anything more. We’ve already seen how small signals, amplified by the special structures of nerve tissue and societies of conscious beings, can lead to changes in a Narrative—in the configuration of a cosmos—that are much larger than the original signals in question. The worldtracks veer, change their courses in response to those faint signals, and you could distinguish a cosmos that was populated by conscious organisms from one that wasn’t by observing the way their worldtracks behaved. But recall that the signals in question only pass between cosmi whose worldtracks are close together. There is your feedback! Crosstalk steers the worldtracks of consciousness-bearing cosmi; worldtracks that steer close together exchange more crosstalk.”

  “So the feedback pulls worldtracks close to one another as time goes on?” Ignetha Foral asked. “Is this the explanation we’ve been looking for of why the Geometers look like us?”

  “Not only that,” put in Suur Asquin, “but of cnoöns and the HTW and all the rest, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “I am going to be a typical Lorite,” Moyra said, “and caution you that feedback is a layman’s term that covers a wide range of phenomena. Entire branches of theorics have been, and are still being, developed to study the behavior of systems that exhibit what laymen know as feedback. The most common behaviors in feedback systems are degenerate. Such as the howl from a public address system, or total chaos. Very few such systems yield stable behavior—or any sort of behavior that you or I could look at and say, ‘see, it is doing this now.’”

  “Thisness!” Zh’vaern exclaimed.

  “But conversely,” Moyra went on, “systems that are stable, in a tumultuous universe, generally must have some kind of feedback in order to exist.”

  Ignetha Foral nodded. “So if the feedback posited by Fraa Jad really is steering our worldtrack and those of the PAQD races together, it’s not just any feedback but some very special, highly tuned species of it.”

  “We call something an attractor,” Paphlagon said, “when it persists or recurs in a complex system.”

  “So if it is true that the PAQD share the Adrakhonic Theorem and other such theorical concepts with us,” said Fraa Lodoghir, “those might be nothing more than attractors in the feedback system we have been describing.”

  “Or nothing less,” said Fraa Jad.

  We all let that one resonate for a minute. Lodoghir and Jad were staring at each other across the table; we all thought something was about to happen.

  A Procian and a Halikaarnian were about to agree with each other.

  Then Zh’vaern wrecked it. As if he didn’t get what was going on at all; or perhaps the HTW simply was not that interesting to him. He couldn’t get off the topic of Atamant’s bowl.

  “Atamant,” he announced, “changed his bowl.”

  “I beg your pardon?” demanded Ignetha Foral.

  “Yes. For thirty years, it had a scratch on the bottom. This is attested by phototypes. Then, during the final year of his meditation—shortly before his death—he made the scratch disappear.”

  Everyone had become very quiet.

  “Translate that into polycosmic language, please?” asked Suur Asquin.

  “He found his way to a cosmos the same as the one he’d been living in—except that in this cosmos the bowl wasn’t scratched.”

  “But there were records—phototypes—of its having been scratched.”

  “Yes,” said Zh’vaern. “so he had gone to a cosmos that included some inconsistent records. And that is the cosmos that we are in now.”

  “And how did he achieve this feat?” asked Moyra, as if she already guessed the answer.

  “Either by changing the records, or else by shifting to a cosmos with a different future.”

  “Either he was a Rhetor, or an Incanter!” blurted a young voice. Barb. Performing his role as sayer of things no one else would say.

  “That’s not what I meant,” said Moyra. “How did he achieve it?”

  “He declined to share his secret,” said Zh’vaern. “I thought that some here might have something to say of it.” And he looked all around the table—but mostly at Jad and Lodoghir.

  “If they do, they’ll say it tomorrow,” announced Ignetha Foral. “Tonight’s messal has ended.” And she pushed her chair back, casting a baleful glare at Zh’vaern. Emman burst through the door and snatched up her rucksack. Madame Secretary adjusted the badge around her neck as if it were just another item of jewelry, and stalked out, pursued by her servitor, who was grunting under the weight of two rucksacks.

  I had grand plans for how I would spend the free time I’d won in my wager with Arsibalt. There were so many ways I wanted to use that gift that I could not decide where to start. I went back to my cell to fetch some notes and sat down on my pallet. Then I opened my eyes to find it was morning.

  The hours of night had not gone to waste, though, for I awoke with ideas and intentions that had not been in my head when I’d closed my eyes. Given the sorts of things we’d been talking about lately at messal, it was hard not to think that while I’d lain unconscious, my mind had been busy rambling all over the local parts of Hemn space, exploring alternate versions of the world.

  I went and found Arsibalt, who had slept less than I. He was inclined to surliness until I shared with him some of what I had been thinking about—if thinking was the right word for processes that had taken place without my volition while I had been unconscious.

  For breakfast I had some dense, grainy buns and dried fruit. Afterwards, I went to a little stand of trees out behind the First Sconic chapterhouse. Arsibalt was waiting for me there, brandishing a shovel he’d borrowed from a garden shack. He scooped out a shallow depression in the earth, no larger than a serving-bowl. I lined it with a scrap of poly sheeting that I had scavenged from one of the middens that Saecular people left everywhere they went—and that had lately begun to pock the grounds of this concent.

  “Here goes nothing,” I said, hitching up my bolt.

  “The best experiments,” he said, “are the simplest.”

  Analyzing the givens only took a few minutes. The rest of the day was spent making various preparations. How Arsibalt and I got others involved in that work, and the minor adventures each of us had during the day, would make for an amusing collection of anecdotes, but I have made the decision not to spell them out here because they are so trivial compared to what happened that evening. Before it was over, though, we had enlisted Emman, Tris, Barb, Karvall, Lio, and Sammann, and had talked Suur Asquin into looking the other way while we made some temporary alterations to her Dowment.

  The fourth Plurality of Worlds Messal began normally: after a libation, soup was served. Barb and Emman went back to the kitchen. Not long after, Orhan was yanked. Tris followed him out. About a minute later I felt a coded sequence of tugs on my rope, which informed me that things had gone according to plan in the kitchen: the stew that Orhan had been cooking had “inadvertently” been knocked over by clumsy Barb. Between that distraction, and the racket that Tris and Emman had begun making with some pots and pans, Orhan would be unlikely to notice that sound was no longer coming out of the speaker.

  I nodded across the table to Arsibalt.

  “Excuse me, Fraa Zh’vaern, but you forgot to bless your food,” Arsibalt announced, in a clear voice.

  Conversation stopped. The messal had been unusually subdued to this point, as though all the doyns were trying to devise some way of restarting the dialog while avoiding the awkward territory that Zh’vaern had attempted to drag us into last night. Even in the rowdiest messal, though, any unasked-for statement from a servitor would have been shocking; Arsibalt’s was doubly so because of what he’d said. As long as everyone was speechless, he went on: “I have been studying the beliefs and practices of the Matarrhites. They never take food without saying a
prayer, which ends with a gesture. You have neither spoken the prayer nor made the gesture.”

  “What of it? I forgot,” Zh’vaern said.

  “You always forget,” Arsibalt returned.

  Ignetha Foral was giving Paphlagon a look that meant when are you going to throw the Book at your servitor? and indeed Paphlagon now threw down his napkin and made as if to push his chair back. But Fraa Jad reached out and clamped a hand on Paphlagon’s arm.

  “You always forget,” Arsibalt repeated, “and, if you like, I can list any number of other ways in which you and Orhan have imperfectly simulated the behavior of Matarrhites. Is it because you’re not actually Matarrhites?”

  Beneath the hood, Zh’vaern’s head moved. He was casting a glance at the door. Not the one through which he and the other doyns had entered, but the one through which Orhan had left.

  “Your minder can’t hear us,” I told him, “the microphone wire has been cut by an Ita friend of mine. The feed no longer goes out.”

  Still Zh’vaern remained frozen and silent. I nodded at Suur Karvall, who pulled aside a tapestry to reveal a shiny mesh, woven of metal wires, with which we’d covered the wall. I stepped around toward Zh’vaern, stuck a toe under the edge of the carpet, and flipped it up to reveal more of the same on the floor. Zh’vaern took it all in. “It is a fencing material used in animal husbandry,” I explained, “obtainable in bulk extramuros. It is conductive—and it is connected to ground.”

  “What is the meaning of all this?” demanded Ignetha Foral.

  “We’re in a Saunt Bucker’s Basket!” exclaimed Moyra. Her life, as an extremely senior, semi-retired Lorite, probably didn’t include many unexpected events, and so even something as mundane as discovering that she was surrounded by chicken wire seemed like quite an adventure. More than that, though, I believe she was pleased that the servitors had taken her exhortations to heart, and gone out and done something that the doyns never would have dreamed of. “It’s a grounded mesh that prevents wireless signals from passing into or out of the room. It means we’re informationally shielded from the rest of Arbre.”

  “In my world,” said Zh’vaern, “we call it a Faraday cage.” He stood up and shrugged his bolt off over his head, then tossed it to the floor. I was behind him and so could not see his face—only the looks of awe and astonishment on the faces of the others: the first Arbrans, with the possible exception of the Warden of Heaven, to gaze upon the face of a living alien. Judging from the back of his head and torso, I guessed he was of the same race as the dead woman who’d come down in the probe. Beneath a sort of under-shirt, a small device was attached to his skin with poly tape. He reached under the garment, peeled it off, and threw it on the table along with a snarl of wires.

  “I am Jules Verne Durand of Laterre—the world you know as Antarct. Orhan is from the world of Urnud, which you have designated Pangee. You had best get him inside the Faraday cage before—”

  “Done,” said a voice from the door: Lio, who had just come in, cheerfully flushed. “We have him in a separate Bucker’s Basket in the pantry. Sammann found this on him.” And he held up another wireless body transmitter.

  “Well-wrought,” said Jules Verne Durand, “but it has purchased you a few minutes only; those who listen will grow suspicious at the loss of contact.”

  “We have alerted Suur Ala that it might become necessary to evacuate the concent,” Lio said.

  “Good,” said Jules Verne Durand, “for I am sorry to say that the ones of Urnud are a danger to you.”

  “And to you of Laterre as well, it would seem!” said Arsibalt. Since the doyns were all too speechless to rejoin the conversation, Arsibalt—who’d had time to prepare—was doing his bit to keep things going.

  “It is true,” said the Laterran. “I will tell you quickly that those of Urnud and of Tro—which you call Diasp—are of similar mind, and hostile to those of Fthos—which you call—”

  “Quator, by process of elimination,” said Lodoghir.

  I’d worked my way round to a place where I could see Jules Verne Durand, and so was feeling some of the astonishment that the others had experienced a few moments earlier. First at the differences—then similarities, then differences again—between Laterran and Arbran faces. The closest comparison I can make is to how one reacts when conversing with one who has a birth defect that has subtly altered the geometry of the face—but without the deformity or loss of function that this would imply. And of course no comparison can be drawn to the way we felt knowing that we were looking on one who had traveled from another cosmos.

  “What of you and your fellow Laterrans?” Lodoghir asked.

  “Split between the Fthosians and the others.”

  “You, I take it, are loyal to the Urnud/Tro axis?” Lodoghir asked. “Otherwise, you would not have been sent here.”

  “I was sent here because I speak better Orth than anyone else—I am a linguist. A junior one, actually. And so they put me to work on Orth in the early days, when Orth was believed to be a minor language. They are suspicious of my loyalty—with good reason! Orhan, as you divined, is my watcher—my minder.” He looked at Arsibalt. “You penetrated my disguise. Not surprising, really. But I should like to know how?”

  Arsibalt looked to me. I said, “I ate some of your food yesterday. It passed through my digestive system unchanged.”

  “Of course, for your enzymes could not react with it,” said Jules Verne Durand. “I commend you.”

  Ignetha Foral had finally recovered enough to join the conversation. “On behalf of the Supreme Council I welcome you and apologize for any mistreatment you have undergone at the hands of these young—”

  “Stop. This is what you call bulshytt. No time,” said the Laterran. “My mission—assigned to me by the military intelligence command of the Urnud/Tro axis—is to find out whether the legends of the Incanters are grounded in fact. The Urnud/Tro axis—which they call, in their languages, the Pedestal—is extremely fearful of this prospect; they contemplate a pre-emptive strike. Hence my questions of previous evenings, which I am aware were quite rude.”

  “How did you get here?” asked Paphlagon.

  “A commando raid on the concent of the Matarrhites. We have ways of dropping small capsules onto your planet that cannot be noticed by your sensors. A team of soldiers, as well as a few civilian experts such as myself, were sent down, and seized that concent. The true Matarrhites are held there, unharmed, but incommunicado.”

  “That is an extraordinarily aggressive measure!” said Ignetha Foral.

  “So it rightly seems to you who are not accustomed to encounters between different versions of the world, in different cosmi. But the Pedestal have been doing it for hundreds of years, and have become bold. When our scholars became aware of the Matarrhites, someone pointed out that their style of dress would make it easy for us to disguise ourselves and infiltrate the Convox. The order to proceed was given quickly.”

  “How do you travel between cosmi?” Paphlagon asked.

  “There is little time,” said Jules Verne Durand, “and I am no theor.” He turned to Suur Moyra. “You will know of a certain way of thinking about gravity, likely dating to the time of the Harbingers, called by us General Relativity. Its premise is that mass-energy bends spacetime…”

  “Geometrodynamics!” said Suur Moyra.

  “If the equations of geometrodynamics are solved in the special case of a universe that happens to be rotating, it can be shown that a spaceship, if it travels far and fast enough—”

  “Will travel backwards in time,” said Paphlagon. “Yes. The result is known to us. We always considered it little more than a curiosity, though.”

  “On Laterre, the result was discovered by a kind of Saunt named Gödel: a friend of the Saunt who had earlier discovered geometrodynamics. The two of them were, you might say, fraas in the same math. For us, too, it was little more than a curiosity. For one thing, it was not clear at first that our cosmos rotated—”

&nbs
p; “And if it doesn’t rotate, the result is useless,” said Paphlagon.

  “Working in the same institute were others who invented a ship propelled by atomic bombs—sufficiently energetic to put this theory to the test.”

  “I see,” said Paphlagon, “so Laterre constructed such a ship and—”

  “No! We never did!”

  “Just as Arbre never did—even though we had the same ideas!” Lio put in.

  “But on Urnud it was different,” said Jules Verne Durand. “They had geometrodynamics. They had the rotating-universe solution. They had cosmographic evidence that their cosmos did in fact rotate. And they had the idea for the atomic ship. But they actually built several of them. They were driven to such measures because of a terrible war between two blocs of nations. The combat infected space; the whole solar system became a theatre of war. The last and largest of these ships was called Daban Urnud, which means ‘Second Urnud.’ It was designed to send a colony to a neighboring star system, only a quarter of a light-year away. But there was a mutiny and a change of command. It fell under the control of ones who understood the theorics that I spoke of. They chose to steer a different course: one that was intended to take them into the past of Urnud, where they hoped that they could undo the decisions that had led to the outbreak of the war. But when they reached the end of that journey, they found themselves, not in the past of Urnud, but in an altogether different cosmos, orbiting an Urnud-like planet—”

  “Tro,” said Arsibalt.

  “Yes. This is how the universe protects herself—prevents violations of causality. If you attempt to do anything that would give you the power of violating the laws of cause-and-effect—to go back in time and kill your grandfather—”

  “You simply find yourself in a different and separate causal domain? How extraordinary!” said Lodoghir.

  The Laterran nodded. “One is shunted into an altogether different Narrative,” he said, with a glance at Fraa Jad, “and thus causality is preserved.”