Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

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

  Red light woke me, or kept me from sleeping in the first place. It was not the clear, cold blood-red of warnings and emergencies, but pink/orange, warm, diffuse. It was coming in through the windows of the aerocraft, which were few and tiny. I unbuckled myself, staggered over to one—for I’d lain wrong, and my limbs were tingling and floppy—and squinted out at a spectacular dawn above the same ice-scape I’d recently traversed on a sledge.

  For a confused minute I fancied we might, for some reason, be headed back to Ecba. But I had no success matching the mountain ranges and glaciers below against those I recollected. Out of habit I looked for Sammann, hoping he could conjure up a map. But he was huddled with Jules Verne Durand. Both were wearing headsets. Sammann just listened. Jules alternated between listening and speaking, but he did a lot more of the latter. Sometimes he’d sketch on Sammann’s jeejah, and Sammann would transmit the image.

  I found myself irked. The Laterran’s presence in Cell 317 had seemed like a medal pinned on our chests. Through him we would know things, be capable of deeds, beyond all other cells. But I hadn’t bargained on the wireless link to the Reticulum that would make him fair game for any Panjandrum who was feeling curious about something. They were pumping him dry before he was rendered useless by inanition. I couldn’t hear a word because of the noise of the plane, but I could tell he’d been at it for a while, and that he was tired, groping for words, doubling back midsentence to repair conjugations. Orth was a murderously difficult language and I thought it a kind of miracle that Jules spoke it as well as he did, having practiced it for only a couple of years (which, we’d calculated, was about how long the Geometers had been in a position to receive signals from Arbre). Either Laterrans were smarter than we, or he was prodigiously gifted.

  Arsibalt was up, pacing the aisles. He joined me at the window and we began shouting at each other. From our recollected geography we convinced ourselves that we were descending from the pole along a more easterly meridian than the one that passed through Ecba. This was confirmed as we left the ice and the tundra behind and entered into more temperate places: there was a lot of forest down there, but few cities.

  No wonder people were slow to get up; we’d jumped forward through more than half a dozen time zones. I’d fooled myself into thinking I’d had a full night’s sleep. In fact, I might not have slept at all.

  Lio had been sitting alone in the front row, trying to make friends with a military-style jeejah. I noticed he had set it aside, so I went up and sat next to him. “Jammed,” he announced.

  I turned and looked back at Sammann and Jules. They were peeling the phones off their heads. Sammann caught my eye and threw up his hands disgustedly. Jules, on the other hand, seemed relieved to have been cut free of the Ret; he sank back heavily in his seat, closed his eyes, and began to rub his face, then to massage his scalp.

  I turned back to Lio. “Such a move must have been anticipated,” I said. But he had got into one of those Lio-trances where he did not respond to words. I grabbed the jeejah, whacked him on the shoulder with it, threw up my hands, tossed it aside. He watched me curiously, then grinned. “The Ita can still make the Reticulum run on land lines and other things,” he said. “When we stop moving, we can get patched in once more.”

  “What are your orders?” I asked.

  “Go to ground—which we’re doing now. All the other cells are doing it too.”

  “Then what?”

  “At the place where we’re going, there’ll be equipment prepositioned. We’re supposed to train on it.”

  “What kind of equipment?”

  “Don’t know, but here’s a hint: Jesry is in charge of training.”

  I looked over at Jesry, who had commandeered a row of seats and constructed a sort of amphitheatre of documents all around himself. He was scanning these with an intensity that I had learned, long ago, never to interrupt.

  “We’re going into space,” I concluded.

  “Well,” Lio said, “that is where the problem is.”

  I decided to take advantage of the noise, and of the fact that our wireless link was down. “What news of the Everything Killers?” I asked.

  He looked as though in the earliest stages of airsickness. “I think I can tell you how they worked.”

  “Okay.”

  He pantomimed a punch to my face, pulled it so his knuckles met my cheek and nudged my head. “Violence is mostly about energy delivery. Fists, clubs, swords, bullets, death rays—their purpose is to dump energy into a person’s body.”

  “What about poison?”

  “I said mostly. Don’t go Kefedokhles. Anyway, what’s the most concentrated source of energy they knew about around the time of the Terrible Events?”

  “Nuclear fission.”

  He nodded. “And the stupidest way of using it was to split a whole lot of nuclei in the air above a city, just burn everything. It works, but it’s dirty and it destroys a lot of stuff that doesn’t need destroying. Better to nuke the people only.”

  “How do you manage that?”

  “The amount of fissile material you need to kill a person is microscopic. That’s the easy part. The problem is delivering it to the right people.”

  “So, is this a dirty bomb type of scenario?”

  “Much more elegant. They designed a reactor the size of a pinhead. It’s a little mechanism, with moving parts, and a few different kinds of nuclear material in it. When it’s turned off, it’s almost totally inert. You could eat these reactors by the spoonful and it would be no worse than eating one of Suur Efemula’s bran muffins. When the reactor goes to the ‘on’ configuration it sprays neutrons in every direction and kills—well—everything that is alive within a radius of—depending on exposure time—up to half a mile.”

  “Hence the name,” I said. “What’s the delivery mechanism?”

  “Whatever you can dream up,” he said.

  “What causes them to turn on?”

  He shrugged. “Body heat. Respiration. The sound of human voices. A timer. Certain genetic sequences. A radio transmission. The absence of a radio transmission. Shall I go on?”

  “No. But what kinds of delivery mechanisms and triggers is the Saecular Power looking at now?”

  He got a distant look. “Remember, launching mass into space is expensive. With the amount of energy it takes to launch a single human, you could get thousands of Everything Killers into orbit. They’d be too small to show up on most radar. If you could get even a few of them into the vicinity of the Daban Urnud…”

  “Yeah, I can see the strategy clearly. Which leads to the profoundly sickening thought—”

  “Are we going to be asked to deliver these things?” Lio said. “I think the answer is no. If anything, we are going to be a diversion.”

  “We’ll distract them,” I translated, “while some other technique is used to deliver the Everything Killers.”

  Lio nodded.

  “That’s inspiring,” I said.

  He shrugged. “I could be wrong,” he pointed out.

  I felt like going outside and getting some fresh air. In lieu of which I walked up and down the aisles for a bit. Jules Verne Durand was asleep. Next to him, Sammann was bent over his jeejah. But I thought it was jammed? Looking over his shoulder, I saw he was making some sort of calculation.

  Looking over Jesry’s, I saw that he was, indeed, reading the manual for a space suit. This demanded a double-take. But it was as simple as that. Suur Vay was in an adjoining row, poring over many of the same documents, swapping them with Jesry from time to time. The other Valers were asleep. Fraa Jad was awake and chanting, though my ears were hard put to disentangle his drone from that of the engines. I went back to staring out the window.

  We angled across a range of old, worn-down mountains and struck out over an expanse of brown that ran to the eastern horizon: the grass of the steppe, browned by the summer sun. The craft was descending. A river flashed beneath u
s. Then the industrial skirt of a modestly sized city. We landed at a military airbase that seemed to stretch on forever, since land here was as plentiful as it was flat, and there was no incentive to make things compact.

  A canvas-backed military drummon came out to collect us. We had no windows, and could not see out the front, but through the aperture in the back we watched the streets of an ancient, none too prosperous city ramifying in our dust. There were more animals on highways than we were used to, more people carrying things that in other places might have been entrusted to wheels. Of a sudden, things got dense and old, all yellow brick adorned with polychrome tiles. A heavy shadow passed over our heads, as if we were being strafed. But no, we had only passed through an arch in a thick wall. Three successive gates were closed and bolted behind us. The vehicle stopped on a tiled plaza. We clambered out to find ourselves in a courtyard, embraced by an ancient building four stories high: stone, brick, and wrought iron, softened by cascades of flowering vines on trunks as thick as my waist. A fountain in the center supplied water for these and for gnarled fruit trees growing in pots and casting pools of shade on what would otherwise have been an unpleasant place to stand.

  “Welcome to the Caravansery of Elkhazg,” said a voice in cultured Orth. We turned to see an old man in the shade of a tree: a man who did not seem to belong here, in the sense that he was of an ethnic group one would expect to find in another part of Arbre. “I am the Heritor. My name is Magnath Foral, and I shall be pleased to serve as your host.”

  After introductions, Magnath Foral gave us a quick explanation of the history of Elkhazg. I made no effort to follow most of this, since I only needed a few cues and hints to reconstruct what I had been taught of the place as a fid. It was one of the oldest Cartasian maths, founded by fraas and suurs who had personally witnessed the Fall of Baz, and known Ma Cartas. They had trekked across forests and mountains to build this thing more or less out in the middle of nowhere, on an oxbow lake a few miles from the main course of a river. A trade route from the east crossed the river not far away—close enough to give them access to commerce when they needed it, not so close as to be a distraction or a menace. Centuries later, a rough winter followed by a stormy spring caused some trouble involving ice dams that altered the course of the river and turned the oxbow lake back into an active channel. The trade route adapted, choosing Elkhazg as the best place to make a crossing—since one of the side-effects of the math had been the development of a relatively stable and prosperous Saecular community around its walls.

  A certain kind of mathic personality would then have abandoned the place for something more remote, perhaps up in the mountains. The wardens of Elkhazg, though, weren’t that way, and had come to notice that the goods being carried on the backs of the beasts passing over the river included not just fabrics, furs, and spices but books and scrolls. In a compromise that would have made Ma Cartas kick her way out of her chalcedony sarcophagus and come after them with a broken bottle, they had spun off a thriving side business in the form of a caravansery adjacent to the math, and a ferry across the river. The one tariff that they charged was that the fraas and suurs of Elkhazg be allowed to make a copy of every book and scroll that passed through. Books were copied whose meanings they did not even know. But they interpreted their mandate somewhat broadly and began, as well, to make copies of the geometrical designs that they saw on fabrics, pottery, and other goods. For these fraas and suurs had a particular interest in plane geometry and in tiling problems. So, to make a long story somewhat shorter, Elkhazg had become synonymous in the minds of theors all over the world with tiling problems. Important tile shapes and theorems about their properties were named after fraas and suurs who had lived here, or specific walls and floors in this complex.

  It was no longer a math. At the time of the Rebirth its library had been dispersed and copied all over the world, and the building had fallen into private hands. It had not been made over into a new math at the time of the Reconstitution. Instead—as Magnath Foral did not come out and say, but as was easy enough to figure out—it had been taken over by a long-lived complex of financial interests similar to—quite likely the same as—the one that ran Ecba.

  Fraa Jad skipped the intro and wandered off into some other courtyard. Elkhazg had been big and rich and its courtyards went on and on. Now it must appear as a large, rambling black hole in the population density map of the city, since the only people who dwelled here were Magnath Foral and another man who was his liaison-partner; some visiting avout (though these had all been sent packing yesterday); and a staff of janitors-cum-curators who looked after the place. For one of the problems with this kind of art—i.e., tiles cemented to stone walls—was that you couldn’t cart it off to a museum.

  My brain ought to have been shutting down, since I’d had essentially no rest since the shovel experiment at Tredegarh the day before, and the time since then had been freakishly eventful. But the visual environment of Elkhazg was overwhelmingly rich—would have been so even had I not known that every pattern of tiles was not merely a mesmerizing, intricate work of art, but a profound theorical statement as well, shouting at me in a language I was too tired or stupid to understand. This acted like a shot of jumpweed extract, or something, that kept me awake for another hour at the cost of some sanity. When I closed my eyes to get some respite from the relentless grandeur, questions crept out of the darkness. That our host had the same family name as Madame Secretary was, of course, interesting. Was it a coincidence that Cell 317 had ended up here? Of course not. What did it mean? Impossible to say. Should I even be trying to puzzle it out now? No—no more than I should be trying to grasp the significance of the tiling patterns that spread over every surface around me, and seemed to be trying to crawl beneath my closed eyelids and invade my brain.

  One of the courtyards was a Decagon—of course. Fraa Jad found it. The Teglon had already been solved on it, perhaps by some master geometer of yore, perhaps by a syndev. None of us had ever seen a full solution in person before, so we spent a while gawking. Stationed around the edges were baskets of extra Teglon tiles in a different color, which Fraa Jad was nudging around with his toe. It occurred to me I’d never seen him sleep. Maybe Thousanders did something else. We left him to the Teglon. Magnath Foral took the rest of us to the Old Cloister, which had not been remodeled in five thousand years. That is to say it lacked electricity or even plumbing. Each of us got a cell. Mine had a bed, and a lot of tiles. I closed some preposterously ancient and rickety shutters so that I’d not have to see, and consequently think about, the tiles, then sank to my knees and located the bed by groping.

  “It occurred to me,” said Arsibalt, the next time both of us were awake, “I don’t think we have anything like this.”

  “We meaning—?”

  “The modern, post-Reconstitution mathic world.”

  “And this meaning—?”

  He held up his hands and gazed about in an are you blind? sort of gesture.

  We were standing next to a table in an alcove on the ground floor, open to the cloister on one side. The floor of the cloister itself was covered with thousands of identical, horn-shaped, nine-sided tiles that had been joined together with machine-tool precision into a nonrepeating double-spiral pattern that was giving me motion sickness just looking at it. I turned my back on this and looked at a loaf of bread that was resting on the table. This was so fresh that steam was gushing out of the end—Arsibalt, an infamous heel-filcher, had already got to it. The loaf had been made by braiding several ropes of dough together in a non-trivial pattern that, I feared, had deep knot-theoretical significance and was named after some Elkhazgian Saunt. “I just don’t think we have anything this ancient, this—well, fantastic,” Arsibalt continued through a crunchy mouthful of bread-heel.

  “There’s more than one way to be Inviolate, I guess,” I said, tearing off a hunk of bread, and sitting down at the table—which, inevitably, was ancient and covered with precision-cut tiles of diverse exotic wood
s. “You can simply stop being a math.”

  “And thereby become exempt from Sacks.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But what kind of entity owns something for four thousand years?”

  “That’s what I kept asking myself on Ecba.”

  “Ah, so you have a head start on me, Fraa Erasmas.”

  “I guess you could think of it that way.”

  “What conclusion have you reached?”

  I stalled for a while by chewing the bread—which was possibly the best I’d ever had. “That I don’t care,” I finally said. “I don’t need to know the bylaws, the org chart, the financial statements, the tedious history of the Lineage.”

  Arsibalt was horrified. “But how can you not be fascinated by—”

  “I am fascinated,” I insisted. “That’s the problem. I am suffering from fascination burnout. Of all the things that are fascinating, I have to choose just one or two.”

  “Here’s a candidate,” announced Sammann, who had crossed into the cloister from an adjoining court where, I inferred, Reticulum access was to be had. He sat down next to me and laid his jeejah on the table. The screen was covered with the calculations I’d noticed him doing on the plane. “Chronology,” he said. “According to Jules, the amount of time that has passed since the Daban Urnud embarked on its first inter-cosmic journey is 885 and a half years.”

  “Whose years?” Jesry asked, skittering down the stairs from his cell, homing in on the smell of the bread. He closed with it like a wrestler and ripped off a hunk.

  “That, of course, is the whole question,” Sammann said with a grin.

  Arsibalt noticed a pitcher of water on a sideboard and began pouring it out into earthenware tumblers incised with geometric patterns.

  “If Urnud years are anything like ours, that is a long time,” I said. “Thank you, Fraa Arsibalt.”

  “The Urnudans, and later the Troäns, wandered for a long time between Advents. Jules thinks it explains why they are a little tetchy.”