Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  “Thank you for volunteering to demonstrate this amazing feature of the praxis!” Jesry proclaimed. “Lio and Raz, would you be so kind as to give your fraa some privacy?”

  Lio and I collected Arsibalt’s bolt from where he had left it, and held it up, stretched between us, to make a screen as Arsibalt shed his coverall. Meanwhile, Jesry fetched a double extra large space suit and trundled it over. It was suspended from a rolling contraption that he called the Donning Rig. The suit consisted of a big rigid construct, the Head and Torso Unit or, inevitably, HTU, whose upper back hinged open like a refrigerator door. Each arm and each leg was built up out of several short, stiff, bulbous pods, stacked like beads on a string. This gave it a different appearance from the space suits I remembered seeing in speelies, and on the Warden of Heaven: this one was bigger, more rounded, reassuringly solid. Another big difference, at least cosmetically, was that this suit—like all of the others that Jesry had been working on—was matte black.

  Arsibalt stepped toward the Donning Rig, raising his hands to grasp a strategically located chin-up bar, and pulling/climbing to a step poised at the threshold of the suit’s back door. He was surprisingly game. Perhaps he was remembering spec-fic speelies he used to watch before he was Collected, or perhaps he just didn’t like being naked. With some help from Jesry he introduced one pointed toe, then the other, into the leg-holes at the base of the HTU, and lowered himself into them. As his feet descended, the hard segments rotated in different ways. Each bulb, it seemed, was joined to its neighbors by an airtight bearing. All of them could rotate independently, so that elbows and knees could bend normally without the need for a complex joint mechanism. Arsibalt looked even more roly-poly than usual now. He flexed one leg, than the other, giving us a look at how the segments allowed movement by rotating against each other.

  “I want to you take notice of the bags ringing your thighs and waist,” Jesry said, indicating some rubberish-looking stuff hanging limp from the inner walls of the HTU. “In a few minutes, those are going to rock your world.”

  “It is so noted,” Arsibalt said, thrusting one hand, then the other, into the arm-constructs, which seemed to end in blunt hemispherical domes—handless stumps. All we could see now was his back and his arse. Jesry did us all the favor of slamming the door on that.

  Now that our fraa was decent, Lio and I let the bolt drop, then migrated round to Arsibalt’s front side. We could barely hear his muffled voice. Jesry jacked a wire into a socket on the chest and turned on an amplifier. We heard Arsibalt on a speaker: “There’s much for my hands to learn about down here—I wish I could see what I was doing.”

  “We’ll go over it,” Jesry promised. He spoke distractedly, since he was busy examining an array of readouts on the front of the suit—making sure his fraa wasn’t going to asphyxiate in there. I noticed others staring at Arsibalt’s front and looking amused, so I came around to that side of him and discovered that a small flat-panel speely screen was planted in the middle of his chest. It was showing a live feed of Arsibalt’s face, taken by a speelycaptor inside the helmet. It was quite distorted because shot through a fisheye lens at close range, but gave us something to look at other than the opaque smoked-glass face mask. “Pray tell, what are all these nozzles in front of my mouth?” Arsibalt asked, eyes downcast and scanning.

  “Left, water. Right, food and, as warranted, pharmaceuticals. The big one in the middle is the scupper.”

  “The what?”

  “You throw up into it. Don’t miss.”

  “Ah.” Arsibalt’s eyes rose to look out the face-mask at where his hands ought to have been. He raised one arm until its stump was up where he could see it. A hatch popped open. We all jumped back as something like a giant metal spider sprang out of it, flailing its limbs. On a second look, this proved to be a skeletal hand: bones, joints, and tendons mimicking those of a natural hand, but all made of machined, black-anodized metal, and skinless, unless you counted the black rubber pads on the tips of the fingers. It all grew out of a wrist joint that was fixed to the end of the stump. At first, it twitched and flopped spasmodically. One by one, the joints seemed to come under Arsibalt’s control, and it began to move like a real hand. His other arm came up, the hatch popped open, and another hand emerged from it. This one, though, was less human-looking; it was studded with small tools.

  “Explain what you are doing with your hands,” I requested.

  “The ends of the arms are roomy,” Arsibalt said. “There is a sort of glove, into which I can insert my hand. It is mechanically connected to the skeletal hand that you can all see.”

  “Pure mechanism?” Sammann asked. “No servos?”

  “Strictly mechanical,” said Jesry. “See for yourself.” And we gathered round for a closer look. The skelehand was animated by a number of metallic ribbons and pushrods that all disappeared into the arm-stump where, we gathered, they were connected directly to the internal glove that Arsibalt was wearing.

  “Simple, in a way,” was Fraa Osa’s verdict, “yet very complex.”

  “Yes. Except for the airtight seals, the whole thing could have been made by a medieval artisan with a lot of time on his hands,” Jesry said. “Fortunately, the mathic world has a large number of medieval artisans. And, believe it or not, it’s easier to build something like this than it is to make a pressurized space suit glove that’s actually good for anything.”

  “There are other controls as well, in the end of the stump,” Arsibalt volunteered. “If I withdraw my hand from the glove—” The skelehand wiggled, then went limp. It snapped back into its storage compartment in the end of the stump, and the hatch closed over it. “Now,” Arsibalt said, “I’m groping around on the inner surface of the stump, which is replete with all manner of buttons and switches.”

  “Be careful with those,” Jesry suggested. “Most of the suit’s functions are controlled by voice commands, but there are manual overrides that you don’t want to mess with.”

  “How are we to tell all of these buttons and whatnot apart, since we can’t see them?” Arsibalt asked, and on the speely screen we could see his eyes wandering around uselessly as he felt his way around the inside of the stump.

  “Most of them are a keyboard for entering alphanumeric data with the fingertips. Sammann will be able to use it immediately. The rest of us will have to hunt and peck.”

  “So,” I asked, “overall, what do you think? How does it feel?”

  “Surprisingly comfortable.”

  “As you’ve noticed, the suit touches you in relatively few places,” Jesry said. “That is for comfort, and so that your core temp can be regulated by a simple air-conditioning system—obviates the tube garment that the Warden of Heaven had to wear. But where it touches you, it really grabs you—say the words sanitary elimination cycle commence.”

  “Sanitary elimination cycle commence,” Arsibalt repeated, with trepidation rising as he climbed to the end of this ungainly phrase. The words sanitary elimination cycle appeared on a status panel below the speely of his face. His eyes got wide. “Oh, my god!” he exclaimed.

  Everyone laughed. “Care to explain what’s going on?” Jesry said.

  “Those air bags you pointed out to me earlier—they inflated. Around my waist and upper thighs.”

  “Your pelvic region is now completely isolated from the rest of the suit,” Jesry said.

  “I’ll say!”

  “You can do whatever needs doing.”

  “I believe we can skip that part of the demonstration, Fraa Jesry.”

  “Have it your way. Say ‘sanitary elimination cycle conclude.’”

  Arsibalt said it, and we got to have another laugh as we saw and heard his reaction. “I’m being sprayed with warm water. Fore and aft.”

  “Yes. Boys and girls get the same treatment, like it or not,” Jesry said. Jesry now hauled down a thick hose that was part of the donning rig, and jacked it into a not very dignified part of the suit’s anatomy. “We don’t have the infini
te vacuum of space to draw on, so we fake it.” He hit a switch and a vacuum cleaner howled for several seconds. More comedy on the speely screen. Arsibalt informed us that he was now being vigorously air-dried. Then: “It’s over. The bags deflated.”

  “We know,” Sammann said, reading the status panel.

  “You spend some air every time you do this—so use it sparingly,” Jesry cautioned us. “But the point is—”

  “As long as the tender is up and running we can live in these things for a long time,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “This suit is altogether different from that worn by the Warden of Heaven,” Fraa Osa pointed out. “More sophisticated.”

  “Beautifully machined,” I said, wishing Cord could be here to admire the huge ring bearing that encircled Arsibalt’s waist, just below the threshold of the back door, making it possible for him to swivel his hips and shoulders independently.

  “It is literally unbelievable,” was Arsibalt’s verdict. “As highly as I rate our fraas and suurs of the Convox, I can’t believe they could have designed something of such complexity on such short notice.”

  “They didn’t,” Jesry said, “this suit was designed, down to the last detail, twenty-six centuries ago.”

  “For the Big Nugget?” Sammann asked.

  “Exactly. And that Convox had several years to devote to it. The plans were archived at Saunt Rab’s, and preserved during the Third Sack by fraas and suurs who carried the books around on their backs their whole lives. Last year, when the Geometers dropped into orbit around Arbre, there was a whole round of Vocos that we at Edhar never heard about, just to dump talent into restarting the program. Money was spent on an inconceivable scale to build these”—he slapped Arsibalt’s shoulder—“and those.” He waved at the monyafeek. “Note the attachment points.” He swiveled Arsibalt around so that the rest of us could see his back, and pointed out a triangular array of sockets, in the same configuration as the structural lugs on the monyafeek. “One plugs into the other—they become an integrated unit. So we don’t need furniture—no acceleration couches. Air bags in the suit will inflate to cushion our bodies during launch.”

  “Impressive,” Sammann said. “The only thing we won’t be able to do in these things is sneak around.”

  Everyone looked at him blankly. He grinned, and waved at Arsibalt’s chest, all lit up with speely feeds, alphanumeric displays, and status lights. “Pretty much rules out a covert operation.”

  Gratho stepped forward, grabbed a barely noticeable ridge projecting from the HTU at collarbone level, and pulled down. A retractable black screen deployed, slid down, and latched in place just above the waist bearing. All of the lights and displays were now concealed. Arsibalt was matte black from head to toe, as if he’d been sculpted out of damp carbon.

  “It is remarkable,” Osa pointed out, “when one considers that these were not even available when you, Fraa Jesry, went up with the Warden of Heaven.”

  Jesry nodded. “There are now sixteen of them.”

  “But there are eleven of us!” Arsibalt exclaimed, over his speaker. We’d forgotten he was there. His skelehand groped at his waist, found the latch for the screen, and yanked it back up to expose the speely. His familiar look of bulging-eyed surprise was comically magnified.

  “That’s right,” said Jesry.

  “The significance of that should be obvious,” Lio said, “but I will spell it out: we can’t screw this up. It is a similar story with the missile launchers. These were a military secret. There’s no reason why the Pedestal—who have obtained almost all of their knowledge of Arbre from the leakage of popular culture into space—would know of their existence. They were specifically made to be hard to see from above. But as soon as one of them is launched, its thermal signature will be picked up on the Geometers’ surveillance, and they’ll know all about them. So they must be launched all at once, or not at all. There are a couple of hundred. They are all going to be sent up within the same ten-minute launch window, which happens to be three days from now. Eleven of them will be tipped with ‘monyafeeks’ carrying the members of this cell. Quite a few others will carry the equipment and consumables we’ll be needing.”

  “And the remainder?” Sammann asked.

  Lio said nothing, though he did throw a glance at me. Both of us were thinking of the Everything Killers. “Decoys and chaff,” he said finally.

  “What is it we’re expected to do once we get up there?” Arsibalt asked.

  “Consolidate a number of other payloads into a thrust platform—I won’t dignify it as a ‘vehicle’—that will inject us into a new orbit,” Lio said, “an orbit that will bring us to a rendezvous with the Daban Urnud.”

  “We could have guessed that much,” Jesry said. “What Fraa Arsibalt is really asking, is—”

  Fraa Osa stepped forward, giving Lio an if I may? look. We hadn’t heard much out of the Vale leader, so everyone got where they could see him. “The greatest difficulty for ones such as you shall be, not completion of the given tasks, but instead the humiliation and uncertainty that arise from not being able to know the entire plan. These emotions can hamper you. You must simply decide, now, either to proceed with the awareness that the entire plan might never be revealed to you—and, were it revealed, might have obvious defects—or to turn away and allow some other person to occupy the space suit that has been allotted to you.” And then he stepped back. There was a minute of silence as all of us made our decisions. If that was the right word for what was going on in our heads. I didn’t feel any of the emotions connected with real decision-making. To step away from this group at the moment was simply unthinkable. There was no decision to be made. Fraa Osa, who had devoted his entire life to preparing for such situations, no doubt knew this perfectly well. He wasn’t really asking us to make a decision. He was telling us, in a reasonably diplomatic way, to shut up and concentrate on the matter at hand.

  And so that is what we did eighteen hours a day until the truck came to pick us up and take us to the airfield. Though a casual observer might have thought we were working only half the time, and playing video games otherwise. Three of the cells that adjoined the courtyard had been equipped with syndevs hooked to big wraparound speely screens. In the center of each was a chair with disembodied spacesuit arms rigged to it. We’d take turns sitting in that chair with our hands stuck into the arms, groping at the controls. Projected on the screens around us was a simulation of what we might see out of our face-masks when we were floating around in low orbit, complete with all manner of readouts and indicators that, we were promised, would be superimposed on the view by the suit’s built-in syndevs. The controls beneath our fingertips could be patched through to the thrusters on the monyafeeks so that, once we reached orbit, we’d be able to scoot around and accomplish certain tasks. Beneath the left hand was a little sphere that spun freely in a cradle; beneath the right, a mushroom-shaped stick that could be moved in four directions as well as pushed down or pulled up. The former controlled the suit’s rotation, which was pretty easy to manage. The latter controlled translation—moving across space, as opposed to spinning in place. That would be tricky. Things in orbit didn’t behave like what we were used to. Just to name one example: if I were pursuing another object in the same orbit, my natural instinct would be to fire a thruster that would kick me forward. But that would move me into a higher orbit, so the thing I was chasing would soon drop below me. Everything we knew down here was going to be wrong up there. Even for those of us who’d learned orbital mechanics at Orolo’s feet, the only way for us to really grasp it was by playing this game.

  “It is deceptive,” was Jules’s observation. He and I were in one of those cells together. I’d become good, early, at playing the game, since I knew the underlying theorics, so helping others learn it had become my role. “The left hand seems to make a great effect.” He spun the little sphere. I closed my eyes and swallowed as the image on the screens—consisting of Arbre, and some other st
uff in “orbit” around us—snapped around wildly. “However, in truth the six elements have not been changed in the slightest.” He was referring to the row of six numbers lined up across the bottom of the simulated display: the same six numbers I’d once taught Barb about in the Refectory kitchen.

  “That’s right,” I said, “you can spin around all you want and it won’t change your orbital elements—which is all that really matters.” A six-way indicator in the lower right began to flicker, which told me that Jules was using his other hand—the dexter, as he called it—to play with the mushroom, which he called a joycetick. The six orbital elements began to fluctuate. One of them changed from green to yellow. “Aha,” I said, “you just screwed up your inclination. You’re out of plane now.”

  “Very significant in the long run,” he said, “and yet deceptively I observe no great difference now.”

  “Exactly. Let me run it forward, though, to show you what happens.” I had an instructor’s control panel, which I used to fast-forward the simulation, compressing the next half hour into about ten seconds. The other satellites drifted so far away from us that they were lost to sight. “Once you get so far away that you can’t see your friends—or can’t tell them apart from all of the decoys—”

  “I am pairdoo,” he said flatly. “Can you make it run backward?”

  “Of course.” I ran the simulation back to just after he had messed up his inclination.

  “How can I fix it—like so, perhaps?” he muttered, and tried something with the joycetick. The inclination got a little worse, and the eccentricity jumped through yellow to red. “Maird,” he said, “I am fouled up now on two of the six.”

  “Try the reverse of what you just did,” I suggested. He fired the opposite thruster, and the eccentricity improved, but semimajor axis got worse. “Quite a fine puzzle,” he said. “Why did I study linguistics instead of celestial mechanics? Linguistics got me into this excellent mess—only physics can get me out.”