Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  Arsibalt picked up the thread I’d dropped: “So you told yourself that they would send up a re-entry vehicle for us later—launching it from, say, there, or there.” He pointed at the mushroom cloud we’d just passed over, then at another, new one, burgeoning a few thousand miles to the east of it. “Or wherever that’s going.” He was obviously referring to another rod that was just now streaking across the atmosphere below us. I don’t know what it hit. Maybe a rocket factory.

  Of course, Arsibalt was making the point that we were all dead now—beyond rescue, unless we could make it to the Daban Urnud. I was irked, just a little, that he’d put this picture together a bit quicker than I had. And I was also thinking, Here we go again, bracing myself to spend the next ten hours hard-linked to Arsibalt, trying to talk him down from a condition of near-hysteria, persuading him to gulp sedatives from the supply that, I presumed, was stored somewhere in the suit.

  But he wasn’t being that way at all. He was grasping the truth of our situation as clearly as anyone could—more so than I’d done. But he wasn’t upset. More bemused.

  “When we were Evoked,” I reminded him, “you said there was a rumor we’d just get taken off to a gas chamber.”

  “Indeed,” he said, “but I was envisioning something much simpler—quicker—less expensive.”

  It was the kind of joke that would only be ruined by my laughing out loud. I somewhat wished that Jesry and Lio could be in on it. But indeed, before too much longer, our conversation flagged. Arsibalt disconnected from me and began making the rounds, as if table-hopping in the Refectory.

  He was connected to Jesry when Jesry applied power to the tether. This was a simple matter of pumping electrical current down the wire to its far end. Of course, in order to make an electrical circuit, there had to be some way for those electrons to get back up to the nuke. Normally that would have been provided by a second wire, parallel to the first—as in a lamp cord. Here, though, that would have defeated our purposes. Fortunately we were in the ionosphere—the extreme upper atmosphere, permanently ionized by the radiation of the sun, so that it conducted electricity. We got the return path for free. Current only flowed in one direction along that wire. Consequently, it interacted with Arbre’s magnetic field in such a way as to generate thrust. Not a lot of it—not like a rocket engine—but, unlike a rocket engine, we could run it continuously for days, and gradually spiral in to the desired orbit: still, all this time later, the orbit that Ala and I had watched the Daban Urnud settle into by following a trail of sparks across a page in the Praesidium.

  As long as Arsibalt was hard-wired to Jesry, he acted as communicator to the rest of us, getting our attention with sweeping arms and pantomiming a suggestion that we all grab on to something. Then he counted down with his finger. At “five,” one of his skelehands became redundant and he used it to grasp a bracket on the control panel of the nuke. At “one” he grabbed the bracket with his other hand as Jesry flipped a switch. The result was not dramatic, but it was perfectly obvious: we saw the tether adopt a slight bow, just like a taut string being acted on by wind. As it did, the Cold Black Mirror yawed around slightly and settled into a new angle, no longer looking straight down at the surface of Arbre but now canted almost imperceptibly sideways. And that was the whole event. We were under thrust now, as surely as if Jesry had fired a rocket engine. It was, though, a thrust too subtle for our bodies to feel it, and it would have to act on us for days to have any effect.

  Once that had been done, I had a few moments to think about what Arsibalt had been saying. Even taking into account Jules’s and Jad’s medical troubles and my nuke escapade, it had to be said that the launch and the assembly of the Cold Black Mirror, the firing of the decoy and the deployment of the tether had all gone better than we’d had any right to expect. No one had turned up dead, or mysteriously failed to turn up at all. There’d been no accidents—no one drifting helplessly away—we’d recovered as many of the payloads as we needed. Since that had seemed like the most obviously fatal part of the journey, it had put me in too sunny a mood. But ten seconds’ reflection sufficed to make it obvious that this was a suicide mission.

  * * *

  Causal Domain: A collection of things mutually linked in a web of cause-and-effect relationships.

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

  Social conventions evolved. I’d thought some might take it the wrong way if two or three of us jacked together for a private conversation. But I didn’t feel thus when I noticed Lio talking to Osa or Sammann to Jules Verne Durand, and soon it became clear that everyone in the cell was happy to afford others privacy. Sammann strung a network of wires through the frame that everyone could connect to when it was necessary to have an all-hands meeting, and we agreed that we’d do so every eight hours. The intervals between those meetings were free time. Each of us tried to devote one out of three to sleeping, but this wasn’t going so well. I thought I was the only one having trouble with it until Arsibalt drifted over during a rest period and connected himself to me.

  “You sleeping, Raz?”

  “Not any more.”

  “Were you sleeping?”

  “No. Not really. How about you?”

  Up to this point it had been the same, word for word, as the conversations we used to have in the middle of the night back when we had been newly Collected fids, lying in unfamiliar cells, trying to sleep. Now, though, it took a new turn. “Hard to say,” Arsibalt said. “I don’t feel as if I am going through normal sleeping and waking cycles up here. Frankly, I can’t tell the difference between dreaming and waking any more.”

  “Well, what are you dreaming about?”

  “About all that could have gone wrong—”

  “But didn’t?”

  “Exactly, Raz.”

  “I haven’t heard the whole story yet of how you rescued Jad.”

  “I’m not even certain that I could relate it coherently,” he sighed. “It exists in my mind as a jumble of moments when I thought or did things—and every one of those moments, Raz, could have gone another way. And all of the other outcomes would have been bad ones. I’m certain of that. I replay it in my head over and over. And in every case, I happened to do the right thing.”

  “Well, it’s kind of like the anthropic principle at work, isn’t it?” I pointed out. “If anything had been a little different, you’d be dead—and so you wouldn’t have a brain to remember it with.”

  Arsibalt said nothing for a while, then sighed. “That is as unsatisfactory as anthropic arguments usually are. I’d prefer the alternate explanation.”

  “Which is?”

  “That I’m not only brilliant, but cool under pressure.”

  I decided to let this go. “I’ve had dreams,” I admitted, “dreams in which everything is the same, except that you and Jad aren’t here because you croaked.”

  “Yes, and I have had dreams in which I let Jad go because I couldn’t drag him back, and watched him burn up in the atmosphere below me. And other dreams in which you didn’t make it, Raz. We recovered the nuke, but you had simply vanished.”

  “But then you wake up—” I began.

  “I wake up and see you and Jad. But the boundary between waking and dreaming is so indistinct here that sometimes I can’t make out whether I’ve gone from dreaming to waking, or the other way round.”

  “I think I see where this is going,” I said. “I might be dead. You might be dead. Jad might be dead—”

  “We’ve become like Fraa Orolo’s wandering 10,000-year math,” Arsibalt proclaimed. “A causal domain cut off from the rest of the cosmos.”

  “Whew!”

  “But there is a side effect that Orolo never warned us of,” he continued, “which is that we’ve gone adrift. We don’t exist in one state or another. Anything’s possible, any history might have happened, until the gates swing open and we go into Apert.”

  “Either that,” I said, “or we’re just sleepy and worried.”

  �
��That is just another possibility that might be real,” Arsibalt said.

  When we weren’t (according to most of us) dozing or (according to Arsibalt) drifting between distinct, but equally real, worldtracks, we were studying the Daban Urnud. A few paragraphs’ worth of description from Jules Verne Durand, disseminated over the Reticulum, had given the Antiswarm enough information to build a three-dimensional model of the alien ship that, according to the Laterran, was eerily faithful.

  Blow a balloon out of steel, almost a mile wide, and fill it half full of water. Repeat three more times. Place these four orbs at the corners of a square, close to one another, but not quite touching.

  Repeat with four more orbs. Stack the new set atop the old. But give it a forty-five-degree twist, so that the upper orbs nestle into the clefts between the ones below, like fruits stacked at a green-grocer’s.

  Pile on two more such orb-squares, repeating the twist each time. Now you have sixteen orbs in a stack a little more than two miles high and a little less than two miles across. Running up the center of the stack is an empty space, a chimney about half a mile in diameter. Pack that chimney with all of the good stuff: all of the complicated, expensive, exquisitely designed praxis that we have long associated with space travel. Much of it is nothing but structure: steel trusswork to grip those orbs and hold them securely in their places while the entire thing is spinning around at one revolution per minute to create pseudogravity, maneuvering to dodge incoming bogeys, managing the resultant slosh, accelerating under atomic power, or all of the above.

  Once you’re satisfied it’s never going to fall apart structurally, weave in all of the other stuff: a storage magazine capable of holding tens of thousands of nuclear propulsion charges. Reactors to supply power when the ship is far from any sun. Inconceivably complex plumbing and wiring. Pressurized corridors along which Urnudans, Troäns, Laterrans, and Fthosians can move from one orb to another. Trunk lines of optical fibers to pipe captured sunlight from the exterior of the icosahedron to the orbs, to shine on their rooftop farms.

  The orbs themselves are comparatively simple. Inside of them, the water’s free to find its own level. When the whole construct is spinning, the water flees to the outside and settles into a curve on which “gravity” is always equal to what it was on the home planet. When the ship is under power, the water settles into the aft part of the sphere and levels out. People live on the surface of the water in houseboats linked by a web of stretchy lines and held apart by tough air-bladders; when the shape of the water changes, there’s always a bit of jostling. Like any proper boat, though, these are rigged for that; the cabinets have latches so that they don’t fly open, the furniture is attached to the floor so it doesn’t slide around. People live as their ancestors did on the home planet, and may go for days, weeks, without thinking very much about the fact that they’re sealed in a metal balloon being spanked through space by A-bombs—as their families back on Urnud, Tro, Laterre, or Fthos might never think about the fact that they live on wet balls of rock hurtling through a vacuum.

  This construct—the Orbstack—is a nice piece of work, but vulnerable to cosmic rays, wandering rocks, sunlight, and alien weaponry. So, frame walls of gravel around it, and while you’re at it, hang the walls on a network of giant shock pistons. The Orbstack is suspended in its middle, webbed to it. Anything that relates to the rest of the universe—radar, telescopes, weapons systems, scout vehicles—lives on the outside, attached to the thirty shock pistons, or the twelve vertices where the shocks join together. Three of the vertices—the ones down around the pusher plate—are naked mechanisms, but the other nine are all complex space vehicles in themselves. Some are pressurized spheres where members of the Command float around weightless. Others have wide tunnels bored through them so that small vehicles, and space-suited persons, can pass between the interior of the icosahedron and the remainder of whatever cosmos the ship happens to be in. And one is an optical observatory, better than any on Arbre because it enjoys the vacuum of space.

  All of this had been modeled, in more or less detail, by the minds of the Antiswarm during the days that my cell-mates and I had been assembling space suits and playing video games in Elkhazg. The model lived in our suits now. We could fly through it using the same controls—the trackball and the stick—that we had earlier used to steer the monyafeeks. From a distance it seemed impressively complete, with a kind of organic complexity about it; as I flew in closer, though, to explore the core of the Orbstack, I found hovering, semitransparent notes that had been posted by diffident avout, writing in perfect Orth, informing me, with regret, that everything beyond this point was pure conjecture.

  Fraa Jad finally got his wish: a sextant. We had been supplied with a device consisting of a wide-angle lens, like Clesthyra’s Eye, that was smart enough to recognize certain constellations. So it could know our attitude with respect to the so-called fixed stars. That in combination with the positions of the sun, the moon, and Arbre, and an accurate internal clock and ephemeris, gave this thing enough information to calculate our orbital elements. Fraa Jad seized this tool as soon as its presence was made known, and devoted hours to mastering its functions.

  Now that our adventure had turned into an obvious do-or-die proposition, Jules had given up on trying to conserve what remained of his food, and was eating freely. So his energy level sprang back and his mood improved. Whenever he was awake, several others were jacked into his suit, asking him questions about internal details of the ship that had not made it into the model: for example, what the doors looked like, how to operate the latching mechanisms, how to tell a Fthosian from a Troän. I learned that the Geometers had a particular dread of fire in the zero-gravity parts of the ship, and that one could not go more than a hundred feet without encountering a locker stocked with respirators, fireproof suits, and extinguishers.

  That still left a lot of free time. Two days in, I made a private connection with Jesry and told him what I knew of the Everything Killers. Jesry listened attentively, as in a chalk hall, and didn’t say much. By watching his face on the speely screen I could tell that he was thinking about it hard—talking himself into why it made sense. It had been obvious to him that there was something we weren’t being told. Otherwise, the mission made no sense on the face of it. I had given him something to think about. Until he’d thought about it—until he’d had a thought that wasn’t obvious—he’d have nothing to say.

  Text messages trickled in from Cell 87 and appeared on my screen. The first few were routine. Then they started getting weird.

  Tulia: Settle an argument down here…what is your head count up there?

  I pecked a message back: Pardon me, but are you asking me how many of us are alive? Then I fired the message off. Only after brooding over the exchange for a few minutes did I realize that I hadn’t answered her question. By that time, though, we’d lost contact with the ground.

  I called a meeting. We all jacked in.

  “My support cell doesn’t know how many of us are alive,” I announced.

  “Nor does mine,” Jesry said immediately. “They claim I sent them a message a few hours ago implying that two of us were dead.”

  “Did you?”

  “No.”

  “My support cell sent me no messages at all for quite a long time,” said Suur Esma, “because they were convinced I had perished in the launch.”

  “It makes me wonder if something has gone wrong with the Antiswarm,” I said. “All of these cells should be talking to each other on the Reticulum, right? Comparing notes?”

  We looked at Sammann. New body language was required. Since faces could not be seen directly, we had gotten in the habit of shifting our bodies toward the interlocutor to let them know we were paying attention. So, nine space suits aimed themselves at Sammann. Fraa Jad, though, didn’t seem interested. He had already jacked out of the meeting and was clambering to a different part of the space frame. But he had scarcely uttered a word since we had reached space, and so
we paid him no mind. I was even starting to wonder if he had suffered brain damage.

  “Something has gone wrong,” Sammann affirmed.

  “Did the Geometers find a way to jam the Reticulum?” Osa asked.

  “No, the Ret—its physical layer, anyway—is working fine. But there’s a low-level bug in the dynamics of the reputon space.”

  “In Ita talk,” I said, “when you call something ‘low-level,’ you mean it’s really important, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you say any more about what this means for us?” Lio requested.

  “Early in the Reticulum—thousands of years ago—it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information,” Sammann said.

  “Crap, you once called it,” I reminded him.

  “Yes—a technical term. So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back out. They created syndevs whose sole purpose was to spew crap into the Reticulum. But it had to be good crap.”

  “What is good crap?” Arsibalt asked in a politely incredulous tone.

  “Well, bad crap would be an unformatted document consisting of random letters. Good crap would be a beautifully typeset, well-written document that contained a hundred correct, verifiable sentences and one that was subtly false. It’s a lot harder to generate good crap. At first they had to hire humans to churn it out. They mostly did it by taking legitimate documents and inserting errors—swapping one name for another, say. But it didn’t really take off until the military got interested.”

  “As a tactic for planting misinformation in the enemy’s reticules, you mean,” Osa said. “This I know about. You are referring to the Artificial Inanity programs of the mid–First Millennium A.R.”