Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  “And now it seems they’ve made a habit of it!” said Lodoghir.

  Jules Verne Durand considered it. “You say ‘now’ as if it came about quickly and easily, but there is much history between the First Advent—the Urnudan discovery of Tro—and the Fourth—which is what we are all living through now. The First Advent alone spanned a century and a half, and left Tro in ruins.”

  “Heavens!” exclaimed Lodoghir. “Are the Urnudans really that nasty?”

  “Not quite. But it was the first time. Neither the Urnudans nor the Troäns had the sophisticated understanding of the polycosm that you seem to have developed here on Arbre. Everything was surprising, and therefore a source of terror. The Urnudans became involved in Troän politics too hastily. Disastrous events—almost all of them the Troäns’ own fault—played out. They eventually rebuilt the Daban Urnud so that both races could live on it, and embarked on a second inter-cosmic voyage. They came to Laterre fifty years after the death of Gödel.”

  “Excuse me,” said Ignetha Foral, “but why did the ship have to be changed so much?”

  “Partly because it was worn out—used up,” said Jules Verne Durand. “But it is mostly a question of food. Each race must maintain its own food supply—for reasons made obvious by Fraa Erasmas’s experiment.” He paused and looked around the messal. “It is my destiny, now, to starve to death in the midst of plenty, unless by diplomacy you can persuade those on the Daban Urnud to send down some food that I can digest.”

  Tris—who had returned to the messal early in the conversation—said, “We’ll do all we can to preserve the Laterran victuals that are still in the kitchen!” and hustled out of the room.

  Ignetha Foral added, “We shall make this a priority in any future communications with the Pedestal.”

  “Thank you,” said the Laterran, “for one of my ancestry, death by starvation would be the most ignominious possible fate.”

  “What happened in the Second Advent—on Laterre?” asked Suur Moyra.

  “I will skip the details. It was not as bad as Tro. But in every cosmos they visit, there is upheaval. The Advent lasts anywhere from twenty to a couple of hundred years. With or without your cooperation, the Daban Urnud will be rebuilt completely. None of your political institutions, none of your religions, will survive in their current form. Wars will be fought. Some of your people will be aboard the new version of the ship when it finally moves on to some other Narrative.”

  “As you were, I take it, when it left Laterre?” asked Lodoghir.

  “Oh, no. That was my great-grandfather,” said the visitor. “My ancestors lived through the voyage to Fthos and the Third Advent. I was born on Fthos. Similar things will probably happen here.”

  “Assuming,” said Ignetha Foral, “that they don’t use the World Burner on us.”

  I was just learning to read Laterran facial expressions, but I was certain that what I saw on Jules Verne Durand’s face was horror at the very mention. “This hideous thing was invented on Urnud, in their great war—though I must confess we had similar plans on Laterre.”

  “As did we,” said Moyra.

  “There is a suspicion, you see, planted deep in the minds of the Urnudans, that with each Advent they are finding themselves in a world that is more ideal—closer to what you would call the Hylaean Theoric World—than the last. I don’t have time to recite all the particulars, but I myself have often thought that Urnud and Tro seemed like less perfect versions of Laterre, and that Fthos seemed to us what we were to Tro. Now we are come to yet a new world, and there is terrible apprehension among the Pedestal that those of Arbre will possess powers and qualities beyond their grasp—even their comprehension. They have exaggerated sensitivity to anything that has this seeming—”

  “Hence the elaborate commando raid, this ambitious ruse to learn about the Incanters,” said Lodoghir.

  “And Rhetors,” Paphlagon reminded him.

  Moyra laughed. “It is Third Sack politics all over again! Except infinitely more dangerous.”

  “And the problem you—we—face is that there is nothing you can do to convince them that such things as Rhetors and Incanters don’t exist,” said Jules Verne Durand.

  “Quickly—Atamant and the copper bowl?” asked Lodoghir.

  “Loosely based on a philosopher of Laterre, named Edmund Husserl, and the copper ashtray he kept on his desk,” said the Laterran. If I was reading his face right, he was feeling a bit sheepish. “I fictionalized his story quite heavily. The part about making the scratch disappear was, of course, a ruse to draw you out—to get you to state plainly whether anyone on Arbre possessed the power to do such things.”

  “Do you think that the ruse worked?” asked Ignetha Foral.

  “The way you reacted made those who control me even more suspicious. I was directed to bear down harder on it this evening.”

  “So they are still undecided.”

  “Oh, I am quite certain they are decided now.”

  The floor jumped under our feet, and the air was suddenly dusty. The silence that followed was ended by a succession of concussive thuds. These rolled in over a span of perhaps a quarter of a minute—twenty of them in all. Lio announced, “No cause for alarm. This is according to plan. What you’re hearing are controlled demolition charges, taking down sections of the outer wall—creating enough apertures for us to get out of the concent quickly, so we don’t bunch up at the Day Gate. The evacuation is under way. Look at your badges.”

  I pulled mine out from under a fold of my bolt. It had come alive with a color map of my vicinity, just like the nav screen on a cartabla. My evacuation route was highlighted in purple. Superimposed over that was a cartoon rendering of a rucksack with a red flashing question mark.

  The doyns took the momentous step of pushing their chairs back. They were looking at their badges, making remarks. Lio vaulted up onto the table and stamped his foot, very loud. They all looked up at him. “Stop talking,” he said.

  “But—” said Lodoghir.

  “Not a word. Act!” And Lio gave that command in a voice I’d never heard from him before—though I had once heard something like it in the streets of Mahsht. He’d been training his voice, as well as his body—learning Vale-lore tricks of how to use it as a weapon. I sidestepped past a stream of doyns who were headed the other way, shouldering their rucksacks. I entered the corridor, where mine was waiting. I hoisted it to one shoulder and looked at my badge again. The rucksack cartoon had disappeared. I strode out to the kitchen. Tris and Lio were helping Jules Verne Durand package what was left of his food into bags and baskets.

  I walked out the back of Avrachon’s Dowment and into the midst of a total evacuation of the ancient concent of Tredegarh.

  Thousands of feet above, aerocraft were landing on the tops of the Thousanders’ towers.

  All of this business with the badges and the rucksacks had seemed insultingly simpleminded to me and many others I’d talked to—as if the Convox were a summer camp for five-year-olds. In the course of a fifteen-minute jog across Tredegarh, I came to appreciate it. There was no plan, no procedure, so simple that it could not get massively screwed up when thousands of persons tried to carry it out at the same time. Doing it in the dark squared the amount of chaos, doing it in a hurry cubed it. People who had mislaid their badges and their rucksacks were wandering around in more or less panic—but they gravitated to sound trucks announcing “Come to me if you have lost your badge or your rucksack!” Others twisted ankles, hyperventilated, even suffered from heart trouble—military medics pounced on these. Grandfraas and grandsuurs who failed to keep up found themselves being carried on fids’ backs. Running through the dark, mesmerized by their badges, people banged into one another in grand slapstick style, fell down, got bloody noses, argued as to whose fault it had been. I slowed to help a few victims, but the aid teams were astoundingly efficient—and quite rude about letting me know I should head for an exit rather than getting in their way. Ala had really put her stamp
on this thing. As I gained confidence that the evacuation was basically working, I moved faster, and struck out across the giant page tree plantation, heavy with leaves that would never be harvested, toward a rugged gap that had been blasted through the ancient wall. The opening was choked with rubble. Lights shone through from extramuros, making the dusty air above the aperture glow blue-white, and casting long, flailing silhouettes behind the avout who were streaming through it, clambering over the rubble-pile, helped over tricky parts by soldiers who played flashlights over patches of rough footing and barked suggestions at any avout who stumbled or looked tentative. My badge told me to go through it, so I did, trying not to think about how many centuries the stones I trod had stood until tonight, the avout who’d cut them to shape and laid them in place.

  Beyond the wall was a glacis, a belt of open territory that locals used as a park. This evening it had become a depot for military drummons: simple flatbeds whose backs had been covered by canvas awnings. At first I saw only the few that stood closest to the base of the rubble-pile, since these lay in the halo of light. But my badge was insisting that I penetrate the darkness beyond. When I did, I became aware that these drummons were scattered across what seemed like square miles of darkness. I heard their engines idling all around, and I saw cold light thrown off by glow buds, by the spheres of wandering avout, and by control panels reflecting in drivers’ eyes. The vehicles themselves were running dark.

  Something overtook me, parted around me, and moved on. I felt rather than heard it. It was a squad of Valers, swathed in black bolts, running silently through the night.

  I jogged on for some minutes, taking a winding route, since my badge kept trying to get me to walk through parked drummons. Another blown wall section, with its mountain of light, passed by on my right, and I saw yet another swinging into view around the curve of the wall. All of these gaps continued to spew avout, so I didn’t get the sense that I was late. Here and there I’d spy a lone fraa or suur, face illuminated by badge-light, approaching the open back of a drummon, eyes jumping between badge and vehicle, the face registering growing certainty: yes, this is the one. Hands reaching out of the dark to help them aboard, voices calling out to them in greeting. Everyone was strangely cheerful—not knowing what I and a few others now knew about what we were getting into.

  Finally the purple line took me out beyond the last of the parked drummons. Only one vehicle remained that was large enough to carry a cell of any appreciable size: a coach, gaudy with phototypes of ecstatic gamblers. It must have been commandeered from a casino. I could not believe that this was my destination, but every time I tried to dodge around it, the purple line irritably re-vectored itself and told me to turn back around. So I approached the side door and gazed up the entry stair. A military driver was sitting there, lit by his jeejah. “Erasmas of Edhar?” he called out—apparently reading signals from my badge.

  “Yes.”

  “Welcome to Cell 317,” he said, and with a jerk of the head told me to come aboard. “Six down, five to go,” he muttered, as I lurched past him. “Put your pack on the seat next to you—quick on, quick off.”

  The aisle of the coach and the undersurfaces of the luggage shelves were lined with strips that cast dim illumination on the seats and the people in them. It was sparsely occupied. Soldiers, talking on or busy with jeejahs, had claimed the first couple of rows. Officers, I thought. Then, after a few empty rows, I saw a face I recognized: Sammann, lit by his super-jeejah as usual. He glanced up and recognized me, but I didn’t see the old familiar grin on his face. Instead his eyes darted back for a moment.

  Gazing into the gloom that stretched behind him, I saw several rows of seats occupied by rucksacks. Next to each was a shaven head, bowed in concentration.

  I stopped so hard that my pack’s momentum nearly knocked me over. My mind said, boy, did you ever get on the wrong coach, idiot! and my legs tried to get me out of there before the driver could close the door and pull out.

  Then I recalled that the driver had greeted me by name and told me to come aboard.

  I glanced at Sammann, who adopted a sort of long-suffering expression that only an Ita could really pull off, and shrugged.

  So I swung my pack down into an empty row and took a seat. Just before I sat down, I scanned the faces of the Valers. They were Fraa Osa, the FAE; Suur Vay, the one who’d sewn me back together with fishing line; Suur Esma, the one who had danced across the plaza in Mahsht, charging the sniper; and Fraa Gratho, the one who had placed his body between me and the Gheeth leader’s gun and later disarmed him.

  I sat motionless for a while, wondering how to get ready for whatever was to come, wishing it would just start.

  Next on the coach was Jesry. He saw what I had seen. In his face I thought I read some of the same emotions, but less so; he’d already been picked to go to space, he was probably expecting something like this. As he walked past me, he socked me on the shoulder. “Good to be with you,” he said, “there is no one I would rather be vaporized with, my fraa.”

  “You’re getting your wish,” I said, recalling the talk we’d had at Apert.

  “More of it than I wished for,” he returned, and banged down into the seat across the aisle from me.

  A few minutes later we were joined by Fraa Jad, who sat alone behind the officers. He nodded to me, and I nodded back; but once he had made himself comfortable, the Valers came up the aisle one by one to introduce themselves to him and to pay their respects.

  A young female Ita came in, followed by a very old male one. They stood around Sammann for a few minutes, reciting numbers to one another. I fancied that we were going to have three Ita in our cell, but then the two visitors walked off the coach and we did not see them again.

  When Fraa Arsibalt arrived, he stood at the head of the aisle, next to the driver, and considered fleeing for a good half-minute. Finally he drew an enormous breath, as if trying to suck every last bit of air out of the coach, and marched stolidly up the aisle, taking a seat behind Jesry. “I had damned well better get my own stained-glass window for this.”

  “Maybe you’ll get an Order—or a concent,” I proposed.

  “Yes, maybe—if such things continue to exist by the time the Advent is finished.”

  “Come off it, we are the Hylaean Theoric World of these people!” I said. “How can they possibly destroy us?”

  “By getting us to destroy ourselves.”

  “That’s it,” said Jesry. “You, Arsibalt, just appointed yourself the morale officer for Cell 317.”

  Jesry didn’t understand some of the remarks that Arsibalt and I had exchanged, and so we set about explaining what had happened at messal. In the middle of this, Jules Verne Durand came aboard, hung all about with a motley kit of bags, bottles, and baskets. His presence in the cell must have been a last-minute improvisation; Ala couldn’t have planned on him. He looked slightly aghast for a minute, then—if I read his face right—cheered up. “My namesake would be unspeakably proud!” he announced, and walked the full length of the aisle, introducing himself as Jules to each member of Cell 317 in turn. “I shall be pleased to starve to death in such company!”

  “That alien must have some namesake!” Jesry muttered after Jules had passed us.

  “My friend, I’ll tell you all about him during the adventures that are to come!” said Jules, who had overheard; Laterran ears were pretty sharp, apparently.

  “Ten down, one to go,” called the driver to someone who was evidently standing at the base of the steps.

  “All right,” said a familiar voice, “let’s go!” Lio bounded up onto the coach. The door hissed shut behind him and we began to move. Lio, like Jules before him, worked his way down the aisle, somehow maintaining his balance even as the coach banked and jounced over rough ground. Those unknown to him got handshakes. Edharian clock-winders got spine-cracking hugs. Valers got bows—though I noticed that even Fraa Osa bowed more formally, more deeply, to Lio than Lio to him. This was my first clue tha
t Lio was our cell leader.

  We were at the aerodrome in twenty minutes. The escort of military police vehicles really helped speed up the trip. No hassles about tickets or security; we drove through a guarded gate right onto the taxiway and pulled up next to a fixed-wing military aerocraft, capable of carrying just about anything, but rigged for passengers tonight. The officers at the head of the coach were its flight crew. We filed out, crossed ten paces of open pavement, and clambered up a rolling stair onto the craft. I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t sad. Most of all, I wasn’t surprised. I saw Ala’s logic perfectly: once she had accepted that she was making the “terrible decision,” the only way forward was really to make it—to take it all the way. To put all of her favorite people together. The risk was greater for her—the risk, that is, that we’d all be lost, and she’d spend the rest of her life knowing she’d been responsible for it. But the risk, for each of us individually, was less, because we could help one another through it. And if we died, we’d die in good company.

  “Is there a way to send a message to Suur Ala?” I asked Sammann, after we’d all claimed seats, and the engines had revved up enough to mask my voice. “I want to tell her that she was right.”

  “Consider it done,” said Sammann. “Is there anything else—as long as I have a channel open?”

  I considered it. There was much I could—should—have said. “Is it a private channel?” I asked.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” he pointed out.

  “No,” I said, “nothing further.”

  Sammann shrugged and turned to his jeejah. The craft lunged forward. I fell into a seat, groped in the dark for the cold buckles, and strapped myself in.

  Part 11

  ADVENT

  Teglon: An extremely challenging geometry problem worked on at Orithena and, later, all over Arbre, by subsequent generations of theors. The objective is to tile a regular decagon with a set of seven different shapes of tiles, while observing certain rules.