Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  My description of the Cold Black Mirror might make it sound heavy, but like everything else up here, it weighed practically nothing because it was slapped together of inflatable struts, memory wire, membranes, and aerogels. It was square, fifty feet on a side. Its upper surface was perfectly flat (it was a membrane stretched like a drumhead between knife edges) and perfectly reflective. It was made of stuff that would reflect not only visible light, but microwaves—the frequencies that the Geometers used for radar. When we ventured out from behind the balloon, we would keep it between us and the Daban Urnud, but angled, like a shed roof, so that their radar beams, as they swept across our vicinity, would be bounced off in some other direction. We’d still make a big echo, but it would never come anywhere near the Daban Urnud, and never show up on their screens.

  As long as we were careful about which way the mirror was pointing, we would not be visible against the backdrop of space, because the mirror would be reflecting some other part of space, and all space looked more or less the same: black. If they just happened to zoom in on us with a really good telescope they might happen to notice a star or two in the wrong place, but this was unlikely.

  When we passed between the Daban Urnud and the luminous surface of Arbre it would be a different matter, but we were hoping that a fifty-by-fifty-foot snatch of absolute blackness might go unnoticed on a backdrop eight thousand miles across. It would be like a single bacterium on a dinner plate.

  If the mirror were permitted to get warm, it would emit infrared light that the Geometers might notice, and so most of the ingenuity that had been spent on its design had been devoted to keeping it cold. It was laced with solid-state chillers that were powered by the nuke. The nuke, as Jesry had mentioned, produced a lot of waste heat. This would show up like a casino on infrared, if we were dumb enough to shine it at the Daban Urnud, but as long as we kept the radiators hidden beneath the Cold Black Mirror and pointed in the direction of Arbre, the Geometers would not have a line of sight that would make it possible for them to see it.

  Propulsion was, to get us started, three scavenged monyafeeks, and (for later) a reel of string. Our spacesuits would serve as living quarters, beds, toilets, Refectories, drugstores, and entertainment centers.

  But not as cloisters. Space travel had any number of interesting features, but quiet contemplation was not among them. During Apert, and later when we had been Evoked, the worst part of the culture shock had been the jeejahs. There was no estimating how many times I’d said to myself Thank Cartas I’m not chained to one of those awful things! But this was like living inside of a jeejah: a super-ultra-mega jeejah whose screen wrapped all the way around my field of vision, whose speakers were jacked into my ears, whose microphone transmitted every word, breath, and sigh to attentive listeners on the other end of the line. Part of it was even inside of me: that huge temperature transponder.

  We were only allowed to work for two hours before a mandatory rest break kicked in. And, as I began to suspect, round about the second or third such break, it wasn’t so much to give our bodies a rest as it was to rest our souls from the bewildering, overwhelming, irritating barrage of information being pumped into our ears and eyes.

  Strangely, when I got a moment’s peace, I only wanted to talk to someone. In a normal way. “Tulia? You there?”

  “I am shocked you haven’t fallen asleep!” she joked. “You’re behind schedule—get cracking and relax!”

  I laughed not.

  “Sorry,” she said, “what’s up?”

  “Nothing. Just thinking, is all.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Are we the right people, out of all Arbre, to be up here doing this?”

  “Uh, that decision has been made, and the answer is yes.”

  “But how did it get made? Wait a minute, I know: Ala rammed it through some committee.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t so much a ramming kind of thing,” Tulia said, and I had to smile at the distaste in her voice. “But you’re right that Ala had a lot to do with it.”

  “Fine. No ramming. But I’ll bet it wasn’t all sweet persuasion either. Not all rational Dialog. Not with those people.”

  “You’d be surprised how far rational Dialog goes with wartime military.”

  “But the military must have been saying ‘look, this is obviously a job for our guys. Commandos. Not a bunch of avout, a renegade Ita, and a starving alien.’”

  “There was—is—a backup team,” Tulia allowed. “I think it’s all military. Same training as you guys.”

  “Then how did the decision get made to give us the suits, the monyafeeks—”

  “Partly a language issue. Jules Verne Durand is a priceless asset. He speaks Orth. Not Fluccish. So the team would have to be at least part Orth-speaking. To make it bilingual would pose all sorts of problems.”

  “Hmm, so we were probably the backup option until Jules fell into our laps.”

  “He didn’t fall into your lap,” Tulia reminded me. “You went out and—”

  “Be that as it may, I still find it amazing that the Panjandrums would even entertain the idea, given that they have commandos and astronauts who know this kind of thing cold.”

  “But Raz, you are educable, you can learn ‘this kind of thing,’ if by that you mean how to maneuver an S2-35B and how to assemble a Cold Black Mirror. You’ve spent your whole life, ever since you were Collected, becoming educable.”

  “Well, maybe you have a point there,” I said, remembering the hitherto inconceivable sight of Fraa Arsibalt powering up a nuclear reactor.

  “But the clincher—and here I’m just imagining how Ala would have framed the argument—is that the whole mission, the journey you and the others are going on, isn’t going to be just this. When you get where you’re going, who knows what you’ll be called upon to do? And then you’ll have to draw on everything you know—every aptitude you’ve ever acquired since you became a fid.”

  “Since I became a fid…now that seems like a long time ago!”

  “Yeah,” she said, “I was thinking about it the other day. Finding my way through that labyrinth. Coming out into the sun. Grandsuur Tamura taking me by the hand, making me a bowl of soup. And I remember when you were Collected.”

  “You showed me around the place,” I recalled, “as if you’d lived there for a hundred years. I thought you were a Thousander.”

  I heard a sniffle on the other end of the link, and closed my eyes for a minute. The suit was built to handle just about every excretory function except for crying.

  How could I ever have been so stupid as to think I could be in a liaison with Tulia? Now, that would have been a mess.

  “You ever talk to Ala? Are you in touch with her?” I asked.

  “I probably could if I had to,” she said, “but I haven’t tried.”

  “You’ve been busy,” I said.

  “Yeah. When your cell got shot into space, it made her really important. Really busy.”

  “Well…I hope she’s busy figuring out what we’re going to do when we get there.”

  “I’m sure she is,” Tulia said. “You can’t imagine how seriously Ala takes her responsibility for what she’s—for what happened.”

  “In fact, I have a reasonably good idea,” I said, “and I know she’s worried we’re all going to get killed. But if she could see how well the cell is working together, she’d take heart.”

  We dropped behind Arbre yet again. I’d lost track of how many times we had swung in and out of the Daban Urnud’s line of sight. The others were strapping themselves down to the thrust structures under the Cold Black Mirror. I was up underneath the decoy, running through the final seventeen items on a checklist that was two hundred lines long.

  “Pulling the inflation lanyard,” I proclaimed, and did. “It’s done.” I couldn’t hear the hiss of escaping gas in space, but I could feel it in the hand that was gripping the frame of the decoy.

  “Check,” Lio said.

  “Monitoring inflation proce
ss,” I said, numbly reading the next line of technobulshytt. The listless wad of painted fabric, which we’d been using as a garbage receptacle for the last day, stirred, and began to show some backbone as internal struts filled with gas and began to stiffen. For a while I was afraid it was failing—not enough gas, or something—but finally, over the course of a few seconds, it snapped open.

  “Status?” Lio demanded. Down under the mirror, he could see nothing.

  “The status is, it’s so beautiful I wish I could climb into it and go for a ride.”

  “Check.”

  “Commencing visual inspection,” I said. I spent a minute clambering over the thing, admiring its origami “attitude thrusters,” its paper-light, memory-wire-and-polyfilm “antennas,” its hand-painted “scorch marks,” and other marvels of stagecraft that Laboratoria at the Convox must have toiled over for weeks. I found a “thruster” that had failed to unfold, and popped it loose with my skele-fingers. Whacked on a creased strut until it inflated itself properly. Flicked off a clinging stripe of kitchen wrap. “It’s good,” I announced.

  “Check.”

  The remaining items on the list were mostly valve openings and pressure checks down among the engines. I was conscious that a plumbing failure here would kill me, but had to get on with it.

  “Ten minutes to line of sight.”

  The final step was to set a timer for five minutes, and to start the countdown. Lio’s final “Check” was still in my ears when I felt a mighty yank on my safety line: Osa hauling me in. A few seconds later I was down beneath the Mirror and the others were strapping me down as if I were a homicidal maniac at the end of a day-long chase. All communications had devolved to a series of checklist items and clipped announcements.

  “Eight minutes to line of sight.” My suit’s airbags inflated. Light flared as the Mirror’s engines came on, and I felt the thrust against my back. As usual our faces were aimed in the wrong direction, so we could not see that anything was happening. But this time around, we had a speely feed to watch, so we were able to see the balloon and the decoy dwindling into the distance. By the time that the five-minute timer expired, the decoy was so far away that we could see nothing of it except for a single blue-white pixel as its engines fired.

  A few minutes into its burn, the Geometers could see it too. Because by then the Daban Urnud’s orbit had taken it back into line of sight.

  Our engines had performed their mission of kicking us into a new trajectory that would get us up to the same altitude as the Geometers. We’d never use them again. So we were back in free fall. The in-suit airbags deflated.

  I loosened a couple of straps and twisted around so that I could see the decoy. Its engines continued to burn for another minute or so, as if it were making a spirited attempt to climb up out of low orbit and get on an intercept course with the Daban Urnud.

  Then it blew up.

  It was supposed to. Rather than wait for the Pedestal to do something about it—something we couldn’t predict, something that might have unwanted side-effects on us—the designers of the mission had deliberately programmed the engines to open the wrong valve at the wrong moment. So it flew apart. There wasn’t much in the way of fire, and obviously we couldn’t hear the boom. The thing just turned into a rapidly expanding mess of smithereens, and ceased to exist. Only a few minutes later, we began to see streaks of fire drawn across the atmosphere below us as chunks of it began to re-enter. The Pedestal, we hoped, would think that our pathetic gambit had failed because of a malfunctioning rocket engine—which was all too plausible—and would put all of their sensors to work snapping pictures of the debris, greedily vacuuming up all the intelligence they could get before it was engulfed and burned by the atmosphere. The Cold Black Mirror they would not see.

  The next phase of the journey lasted for several days. It couldn’t have been more different from those first twenty-four hours. We no longer had that high-bandwidth link to the ground. Between that, and the fact that we didn’t have much to do, things got quiet.

  The burn that had taken us out from the shelter of the balloon had put us in a predicament, vis-à-vis the Daban Urnud, a little like that of a bird that is on a collision course with an aerocraft. We would definitely reach the Daban Urnud now, but if we didn’t want to end up as a spray of freeze-dried flesh on its rubbly surface, we would need to slow down before we smacked into it.

  Any other space mission would have done it with a brief rocket engine burn at the last minute, followed by some nice work with maneuvering thrusters. But since we were trying to sneak up, that wouldn’t work. We needed a way of generating thrust that didn’t involve a sudden brilliant ejaculation of white-hot gases.

  The Convox had found the answer in the form of an electrodynamic tether, which was nothing more than a string with a weight on the end, with electricity running through it in one direction. The string was about five miles long. It was slender, but strong—similar to our chords. In order to keep it taut, we had to dangle a weight from the end. The weight turned out to be our spent and now useless monyafeeks, concealed under a smaller and simpler version of the Cold Black Mirror. So our first task, once we’d broken out from the shelter of the balloon, was to lash the monyafeeks together into a compact mass, to deploy another mirror above them, and to attach them to the end of the tether. We waited until Arbre was between us and the Daban Urnud before commencing the most ticklish—verging on insane—part of the operation, which was to throw ourselves into a spin and then use the resulting centrifugal force to pay out the five miles of line. This was sickening and terrifying for a few minutes, until we and the counterweight got a little farther apart. This slowed the rate at which we and the counterweight spun around our common center of gravity, so that Arbre was no longer whipping past us quite so frequently. By the time the counterweight was at the end of the string, the rotation had slowed to the point where we barely noticed it. From now on, we would spin exactly once during each orbit, which simply meant that the counterweight was always five miles “below” us, the string was oriented vertically, and the Cold Black Mirror was always “above” us—where we wanted it. This slow rotation yielded pseudogravity at a level of about a hundredth of what we felt on the surface of Arbre, so we and all of our stuff slowly “fell” upward—away from the planet—unless something stopped us. The something was the frame of inflated tube-struts that helped keep the Cold Black Mirror stretched out flat. We drifted up against it and remained caught there like litter pressed against a fence by an imperceptible breeze.

  Shortly after completing this maneuver, we passed onto the night side of Arbre. This afforded us an excellent view when the Pedestal rodded all of the big orbital launch facilities around Arbre’s equator. The planet was mostly black, with skeins and clots of light sprawling across the temperate parts of the landmasses where people tended to live. The incoming rods drew brilliant streaks across this backdrop, as if chthonic gods, trapped beneath Arbre’s crust, were slicing their way to freedom with cutting torches. When a rod hit the ground its light was snuffed out for a moment, then reborn as a hemispherical bloom of warmer, redder light: comparable to a nuclear explosion, but without the radioactivity. We orbited over the very launch pad from which Jesry had begun his first journey into space, and got a perfect view of an orange fist reaching up toward us. Jesry was fussing over the tender at the time, but he paused in his labors for a few minutes to watch as we flew over.

  I heard a little mechanical pop, and looked over to see that Arsibalt had just jacked a hard wire into the front of my suit. This was how we’d be talking to each other from now on. Even the short-range wireless was considered too much of a risk. Instead we physically connected ourselves, suit to suit, with wires. Likewise, we no longer had the 24/7 high-bandwidth link to the ground. Instead, Sammann was bringing up some kind of link that squirted information—slowly and sporadically—along a narrow line-of-sight beam that the Geometers would not be able to detect. So if Cell 87 had anything to say to me a
fter this, they’d say it in the form of text messages that would flash up on the virtual screen inside my face-mask—but not immediately. We’d been told to expect delays on the order of two hours. And if we didn’t hard-wire ourselves into the reticule, we’d not be able to send or receive anything.

  “It is a high wire act,” Arsibalt remarked. Out of habit I looked at his face-mask, but saw nothing except for the distorted reflection of a mushroom cloud. So I looked down at the screen mounted to his chest and saw his face, staring down at Arbre, then glancing up to make eye contact of a sort.

  I collected myself for a moment. This was the first real—that is, private—conversation I’d had in days. Since I’d choked down the Big Pill and climbed into the suit, every sound I’d made, every beat of my heart, every swallow of water I’d taken had been recorded and transmitted somewhere in real time. I’d gotten into the habit of assuming that every word I spoke was being monitored by Panjandrums, discussed in committees, and archived for eternity. Hardly a way to have an honest or an interesting conversation. But I’d very quickly adjusted to not having Cell 87’s voice in my ears. And now Arsibalt and I had the opportunity to talk. No one else was hard-wired to us. We were alone together, as if strolling through the page trees at Edhar.

  High wire was a play on words: a literal description of the tether that we had just unreeled. But of course Arsibalt meant something else too. “Yes,” I said, “as we have torn open one payload after another I have been keeping an eye out for anything that would serve as a—” And I checked myself on the verge of lapsing into astro-jargon. I’d been about to say “atmospheric re-entry and deceleration system” but it sounded as wrong here as it would have back among the page trees.

  Arsibalt finished the sentence for me: “A way down.”

  “Yeah. And now that we’ve unpacked everything, and thrown away most of it—stripped down to the absolute basics—it’s clear that there is nothing here that can get us back to Arbre. Never was.” I thought about it as I watched another mushroom cloud skidding along below us, rapidly diluting itself and paling like dawn in the cold upper atmosphere.