Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  Essentially all of the Geometers’ surveillance and remote sensing systems had been designed to look at things that were thousands of miles away. As Jesry and the others had learned when they had brought the Warden of Heaven here, the Daban Urnud did have short-range radars for illuminating things that were nearby, but there was no reason to keep them switched on unless visitors were expected. And we had not emerged from behind the Cold Black Mirror until we had approached too close even for those radars to work very well. This was partly luck. If our trajectory had been a little less precise, we’d have been forced to ditch the Mirror farther out, and thereby exposed ourselves to the scrutiny of those systems. But Fraa Jad had wielded his knife at just the right instant. If he did nothing else for the rest of the mission he would still have earned his place.

  In order to see us, they’d have to literally see us. Someone would have to look out a window, or (more likely) at a speelycaptor feed, and just happen to notice eleven matte-black humanoids gliding in against the background of space.

  Its surface was like a shingle beach: flat, assembled from countless pieces of asteroids that had been scavenged from four different cosmi. Light glinted among the stones: the wire mesh that held them together. It seemed as though we were going to collide with a shock piston, which cut straight across our path like a horizon. But we cleared it by a few yards and found ourselves gliding along “above” a new face of the icosahedron, currently in shadow. Each of us was armed with a spring-loaded gun, and so at a signal from Lio, eleven grappling hooks shot out toward the rubble shield, trailing lines behind them. I’d estimate that half of them snagged in the mesh holding the rocks together. One by one the grapnel-lines went taut and began to pull back on those who’d fired them. This caused the ropes that joined us to go tight in a complex and unpredictable train of events, and so there were a few moments of bashing into one another and gratuitous entanglement as the whole cell came to the end of this improvised web of tethers. Our momentum caused us to swing forward and down toward the rubble, a scary development that was somewhat mitigated by the four Valers, who’d been issued cold gas thrusters that they held out before them like pistols and fired in the direction we didn’t want to go. This led to further collisions and entanglements that bordered on the ridiculous, but did have the net effect of slowing us down some. As we got closer, we tried to get legs and/or arms out in front of ourselves to serve as shock absorbers. I was able to plant my right foot on a boulder. The impact torqued me around. I spun and punched another 4.5-billion-year-old rock with the stumpy end of my suit-arm just in time to avoid planting my face on it. Then various ropes jerked on me from multiple vectors and dragged me along for a short ways. But soon everyone stopped bouncing and dragging and managed to grip the wire mesh with their fingers, giving Cell 317 a secure purchase on the Daban Urnud.

  * * *

  Requiem: The aut celebrated to mark the death of an avout.

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

  The darkness was nearly perfect. Arbre was on the other side of the ship, and shed no light here. A new moon, though, was swinging up through the cluttered horizon of the nearest shock piston, strewing faint light by which we cut ourselves apart and sorted ourselves out. Our magnetic boot-soles stuck faintly to the icosahedron, a rubble of nickel and iron. Moving like a man with gum on the soles of his shoes, Sammann made the rounds and checked our connections to the rope/wire.

  “This facet will remain in darkness for another twenty minutes,” Jesry informed us, “after which we have to move to that one.” I supposed he was pointing at one of the three shock pistons that made up our local horizon, but I couldn’t see him. As the Daban Urnud revolved around Arbre, the terminator—the dividing line between the sunlit and shaded halves of the icosahedron—crept around it. On any given facet, sunrise or sunset would be explosively sudden. We’d better not get caught in the open when it happened, because the citadel-like complexes that loomed over the twelve vertices had clear views over the surrounding facets.

  “According to my equipment,” announced Fraa Gratho, “we did not get illuminated by any short-range radar.”

  “They simply don’t have it turned on,” said Lio. “But sooner or later, they’ll probably notice the monyafeeks that Fraa Jad cut loose, or the Cold Black Mirror, and then they’ll go to a higher state of alert. So, which way to the World Burner?”

  “Follow me,” said Fraa Osa, and started walking. If walking was the right word for such a clumsy style of locomotion. I’d like to say we moved as drunks, but it would be an insult to every sloshed fraa who had staggered back to his cell in the dark. Much of our twenty minutes of darkness was burned moving the first couple of hundred feet. After that, though, we learned, if not what to do, then at least what not to do, and reached the nearest horizon with a few minutes’ darkness to spare.

  The shock piston was like a pipeline half-buried in the rubble, but reinforced with fin-like trusses to prevent it from buckling like a straw when it was under load. At its ends, about a mile away in either direction, it swelled like the end of a bone and developed into a heavy steel knuckle. Five such knuckles, coming together from different directions, formed the base of each vertex. Each vertex was different, but in general they had been cobbled together from a mess of domes, cylinders, gridwork, and antennae. Extravagant bouquets of silver parabolic horns flourished from their “tops,” waiting for their turn to gaze into our sun and steal some of our light.

  The triangular rubble-field across which we’d been walking didn’t butt up hard against the shock piston, because there had to be some give in the system; a shock absorber that had been in effect welded to a stiff triangular plate all along its length would not be able to function. Instead the facet stopped ten feet short of the truss-work that enshrouded the shock, and was sewn to it by a system of cables that zigzagged over pulleys. At a glance, it looked awfully complicated, and made me think of sailboats, not starships. But since the Urnudans had been building such things for a thousand years I guessed they had come up with a way to make it work.

  Light shone up from the chasm below. As we neared it we slowed, bent forward, and gazed into the interior of the icosahedron, a volume of some twenty-three cubic miles, softly illuminated by sunlight slitting in through other such gaps and scattering from the icosahedron’s inner walls and the sixteen orbs. It was all as we’d seen it rendered on the model, but of course to see it in person was altogether different. The view was dominated by the nearest of the orbs, swinging by as fast as the second hand on a clock, helpfully painted with a huge numeral in the Urnudan writing system. I’d learned enough of this to translate it as number 5. Orb 5 housed high-ranking Troäns.

  All of my instincts told me to fear the jump across the gap, because if I “fell in” I would drop for some vast distance before getting splattered on a rotating orb. But of course there was no gravity here, no down, nothing to fall into.

  Osa went first, launching himself across the gap and getting himself established on the struts that lent strength to the shock piston. Vay was last on the line. Once we’d all made it over, we hand-over-handed our way across the shock out of concern that the snapping of our magnetic boots against its steel would create an obvious acoustical signature. There was a dizzy moment when our settled conception of up and down was challenged by the next facet swinging into view, defining a new level and a new horizon. Then we got used to it and floated across another gap using the same procedure as before. This was perhaps an overly cautious way to travel ten feet through space. But if we all did it at once, and jumped too hard, we might drift away.

  Sun was striking the struts we had just passed over as we planted our feet on the next facet of the icosahedron, where we could be assured of a few hours’ darkness. This was more time than we needed. Or, to speak truthfully, it was more than we had, since we only had an hour’s oxygen remaining, and the tender was gone.

  Two miles away—directly across the facet—was a hydrogen bomb the size o
f a six-story office building. It was essentially egg-shaped. But like a beetle caught in spider’s webbing, its form was blurred by a fantastic tangle of strut-work and plumbing connecting it to the vertex-citadel. Indeed, that whole vertex appeared to have no practical use other than to serve as a support base for the World Burner. Even if it hadn’t been so enormous, it would have been a difficult thing to miss, because it was all lit up.

  Lit up for the benefit of a hundred people in space suits clambering around on it.

  “Do you think they’re getting ready to launch it?” Arsibalt asked.

  “I don’t think they’re giving it a new paint job,” Jesry said.

  “Very well,” Lio said. I didn’t know who he was speaking to, or what he was giving his assent to. A click on the line suggested that someone had just jacked out.

  Our view of the World Burner complex was interrupted, now, by four black-space-suited figures who had broken away from the rest of us. In the dark, with the suits in stealth mode, we could not tell one another apart, but something in the way that these four moved convinced me that they were the Ringing Vale contingent. They walked abreast, with one—presumably Fraa Osa—slightly ahead of the others. They were spreading a little farther apart with each step.

  “Lio? What is happening?” I asked.

  “An Emergence,” he reasoned.

  When the four Valers were spaced about twenty feet apart, Fraa Osa deployed his skelehands and, like a steppe rider in a shootout, drew a pair of pistol-like objects—the cold gas thrusters—from holsters bracketed to the hips of his suit. The other three did likewise. Then, to all appearances, Fraa Osa fell on his face. He planted his feet next to each other and let his momentum carry his body forward, peeling his magnetic soles loose from the rubble. As soon as he lost that connection to the icosahedron, his feet swung up and his whole body pivoted in space until he was prone. And in the same moment he began to glide headfirst toward the World Burner. He was holding both arms down to his sides, pointing the cold gas guns toward his feet, using them to thrust himself across the rubble plane, like a low-flying superhero. Vay, Esma, and Gratho were all doing likewise. In their wake we could see a roiling in the light, like heat waves, as the plumes of clear gas dissolved into space. At first their movement was achingly gradual, but they rapidly picked up speed, sometimes porpoising up, then correcting it with a calm inflection of the wrist, spreading out as they vectored themselves toward different parts of the World Burner complex, sliding with a kind of wicked, silent beauty over the glossy purple-blue rubble plane. We were able to see them only in silhouette against the lights of the sprawling complex—and that only for the first few moments of their flight. Then they were as invisible to us as they were to the space-suited Geometers swarming over the bomb.

  Lio announced, “We have perhaps only a few minutes to get inside and find something to breathe before every door in the Daban Urnud is locked against us.”

  “What about the Valers?” Arsibalt said.

  “I think it would be wisest to assume that they and everyone working on the World Burner are as good as dead,” Lio said, after a moment’s thought.

  “They are attacking now?” I asked.

  “They are boarding it now,” Lio said.

  Or—technically speaking—reminded me. For we had discussed this eventuality. “What if, when we come in sight of the World Burner, we see evidence that the Geometers are just about to launch it?”

  “Ah, well, of course that would change everything, we’d have to fork to a completely different branch of the plan, not a moment to spare!” I knew we’d gone over it. But I had filed it, in my head, under the category of “things very unlikely to happen, hence safely forgotten.” Lio, however, had not forgotten. “If the Valers can manage to get aboard the World Burner covertly, they’ll hide, and take no further action until just before their air supply runs out. That’s to give the rest of us time to find a way in. But if the World Burner launches—or if someone sees them, and raises the alarm—well—”

  “Bad things will happen,” Jesry snapped.

  “So we might or might not have a little time,” I said.

  “Which means, we should act as if we have none at all,” Lio returned. “Jules?” For the Laterran had been silent for a long time. “You still with us?”

  “Pardon me,” Jules returned. “I am amazed, thinking of the havoc that our friends of the Ringing Vale are about to unleash. It is an inconceivable nightmare for the Pedestal, the worst embarrassment they will have suffered in one thousand years. My loyalties are torn several ways, you know.”

  “No matter how much conflict is in your soul,” I said, “you can’t possibly object to the destruction of the World Burner, can you?”

  “No,” said Jules softly, but distinctly. “In that my feelings are unalloyed. What a shame, if some of those working on it are slain! But to work on such a horrible device—” He did not finish the sentence, but I knew that, inside his space suit, he was shrugging.

  “So mainly you just don’t want to introduce Everything Killers to the Daban Urnud,” I said.

  “That is certainly correct.”

  Lio broke in: “I never thought I’d hear myself saying this, but: take us to your leader,”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Point us to the Urnudans. Then your work is done. You can go home and get a decent meal.”

  “Which is more than we can say for ourselves,” Arsibalt pointed out. “Yes,” Jules said, “the irony. No food for you. Not here!”

  “So then,” Lio said, “what is your decision?” All of us shared his impatience, if for no other reason than that we were running out of air. I’d like to report that I was still thinking coolly, applying the Rake to everything that was clattering through my mind. But in truth I was stunned and bewildered and—if this made sense—hurt by the sudden departure of Osa, Vay, Esma, and Gratho. I’d known, of course, that there were various contingency plans. Had never fooled myself that I could know all of them. But I’d been telling myself all along that the Valers would always be with us. When I’d first seen them on the coach at Tredegarh I’d been horrified by the idea that I was about to be sent off on the kind of mission where such persons might be needed. But over the days since, I had grown used to—and proud of—being on just such a mission. Now, here we were, at its most critical moment, and the Valers were suddenly gone, without explanation, without even a “goodbye and good luck!” The logic of the decision they’d made was unassailable—what could be more important than disabling the World Burner? But where did it leave the rest of us?

  “Is it possible,” I heard myself saying, “that we are a spent delivery mechanism? Like those boosters that threw us into space—to be dumped into the sea?”

  “That’s totally plausible,” Jesry said without hesitation. “We did our lessons well and played some clever tricks to get the four Valers here. That job is done. Now, here we are. No food, no oxygen, no communications, and no way home.”

  “You overestimate the importance of the World Burner,” Jad announced. “It is a bluff. Its existence forces our military to act in ways it would not otherwise. Its destruction would give Arbre back a measure of freedom. But what use the Saecular Power would make of that freedom is yet to be known, and our actions may yet be of some importance. We go on.”

  “Jules?” Lio said. “How about it?”

  “It is tempting to drop through this opening before us, no?” Jules said. For we had instinctively turned our backs on the World Burner, as if this would protect us from whatever was about to erupt there. Once more we were gazing down into the gap, watching Orbs 6 and 7 rotate past, glimpsing the Core in the cleft between them. “But then we are in the light, where we may be seen. And the Orbstack rotates with too much velocity for us ever to catch it. No. We must go in via the Core. But to enter the Core, we must first go in at a vertex.” He toddled around until he was gazing at the vertex that, as we faced the shock piston, was to our left. “That is th
e observatory. You’ve studied the pictures.” He toddled right. “That one is a military command post.”

  “Does the observatory have airlocks?” Arsibalt asked. For all of us were now looking leftward—no one felt up to invading a military command post, not after we’d lost our Valers.

  “Oh yes, you are looking at one,” said Jules, and began walking toward it. We fell in step.

  “Er—I am?”

  “The dome that houses the telescope is, itself, a great airlock,” Jules explained.

  “Makes sense,” Jesry said. “To work on the telescope, they’d want to flood the dome with air. Then, when they were ready to make observations, they’d evacuate it and expose it to space.” Which is where I normally would have become irritated with Jesry for lecturing the rest of us. But it went by me. I was fascinated, dumbfounded, by an idea I had not dared to think of for a week: taking my suit off. Being able to touch my face.

  Arsibalt was on the same track: “The way I smell will probably seem funny when I reminisce about it years hence.”

  “Yes,” Lio said, “if odors can travel between cosmi, everything down-Wick of us is about to die.”

  “Thanks for the preview,” Jesry said.

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” I suggested.

  Sammann asked, “Is anyone going to be on duty in this observatory?”

  “Perhaps not physically there,” Jules said. “The telescopes are controlled remotely on our version of the Reticulum. But the big one will be in use, certainly—making a survey of your lovely cosmos, which is all new to us.”

  The vertex was looming mountainously as we carried on this conversation. Old instincts warned me that we had an exhausting climb ahead of us. But, of course, it was no climb at all, because we were weightless. Without having to discuss it we made for the “highest” and largest of the domes, which, as Jules had promised, was open. It was a spherical shell, split into two hemispheres, which had spread apart on tracks to expose a multi-segmented mirror with a diameter of some thirty feet. We all clambered through the gap between the hemispheres, which was wide enough to throw a three-bedroom house through, and hand-over-handed ourselves “down” to the level of the trusses and gimbals that supported the mirror—all following, I think, a sort of instinct to get indoors, under cover, away from the terrible exposure we had been living with for so long. Jules pointed out a hatch by which we could gain entry to the pressurized regions of the vertex once the dome had been closed and filled with air. There was even a nice big red panic button that we could slam to emergency-pressurize the dome. But he advised us not to use it, because this would trigger alarms all over the Daban Urnud. Instead he pulled himself up on the struts that held the telescope’s objective suspended at the mirror’s focal point. He peeled the reflective blanket off his chest and stuffed it in there, then clambered “down” to rejoin us. Meanwhile, the rest of us tried to stay calm and control our breathing. Arsibalt, who used more oxygen than anyone else, was down to ten minutes. Sammann had twenty-five; the two of them swapped oxygen tanks. I had eighteen. Lio suggested we all try to eat as much as possible; if we were separated from our suits, we’d have no food left except for a few energy bars that we could carry with us. So I sucked more gruel from the nozzle and made a prolonged and labored effort not to throw it right back up into the scupper.