Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  “Inter-cosmic peace and unity,” he returned, so piously that I wanted to laugh—but I’d never give him that satisfaction.

  “On what terms?”

  “Funny you should ask,” he said. “While you were in suspended animation, some of us have been discussing that very topic.” And he nodded a bit impatiently, toward the muzzle of the Orb Four shaft, where everyone else was gathering.

  “Do you think that Fraa Jad’s fate affected the outcome of those negotiations?”

  “Oh yes,” said Fraa Lodoghir, “it was more influential than I can say.”

  I was beginning to feel a little conspicuous and I could see I’d get nothing more out of Lodoghir, so I turned and accompanied him to the head of the Orb Four shaft.

  “I see we have some big-time Procians,” Jesry said, nodding at Lodoghir and his two companions.

  “Yeah,” I said, and did a double-take. I had just realized that Lodoghir’s companions were both Thousanders.

  “They should be in their element,” Jesry continued.

  “Politics and diplomacy? No doubt,” I said.

  “And they’ll come in handy if we need to change the past.”

  “More than they’ve already changed it, you mean?” I returned—which I figured we could get away with, since it would sound like routine Procian-bashing. “But seriously, Fraa Lodoghir has paid close attention to the story of Fraa Jad and has all sorts of profound thoughts about what it means.”

  “I will so look forward to hearing them,” Jesry deadpanned. “Does he have any practical suggestions as well?”

  “Somehow we didn’t get around to that,” I said.

  “Hmm. So does that mean it’s our department?”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  The trip down to Orb Four took a while because of the safety regulations.

  “I wouldn’t have thought it possible,” said Arsibalt’s voice, somewhere on the other side of my blindfold, as we descended. “But this is already banal!”

  “What? Your feet in my face?” For he kept wanting to descend too fast, and was always threatening to step on my hands.

  “No. Our interactions with the Geometers.”

  I descended a few more rungs in silence, thinking about it. I knew better than to argue. Instead I compiled a mental list of all that I’d seen on the Daban Urnud that had struck me as, to use Arsibalt’s word, banal: the red emergency button on the observatory hatch. The bowel-warming machine. Paperwork at the hospital. The Laterran man washing his dishes. Smudgy handprints on ladder-rungs. “Yeah,” I said, “if it weren’t for the fact that we can’t eat the food, it would be no more exotic than visiting a foreign country on Arbre.”

  “Less so!” Arsibalt said. “A foreign country on Arbre might be pre-Praxic in some way, with a strange religion or ethnic customs, but—”

  “But this place has been sterilized of all that, it’s a technocracy.”

  “Exactly. And the more technocratic it becomes, the more closely it converges on what we are.”

  “It’s true,” I said.

  “When do we get to the good part?” he demanded.

  “What do you have in mind, Arsibalt? Like in a spec-fic speely, where something amazingly cool-to-look-at happens?”

  “That would help,” he allowed. We descended a few more rungs in silence. Then he added, in a more moderate tone: “It’s just that—I want to say, ‘All right, already! I get it! The Hylaean Flow brings about convergent development of consciousness-bearing systems across worldtracks!’ But where is the payoff? There’s got to be more to it than this big ship roaming from cosmos to cosmos collecting sample populations and embalming them in steel spheres.”

  “Maybe they share some of your feelings,” I suggested. “They have been doing it for a thousand years—a lot more time to get sick of it than you’ve had. You only woke up a couple of hours ago!”

  “Well, that is a good point,” Arsibalt said, “but Raz, I am apprehensive that they’re not sick of it. They’ve turned it into a sort of religious quest. They come here with unrealistic expectations.”

  “Ssh!” Jesry exclaimed. He was just below me. He continued, in a voice that could have been heard in all twelve Orbs, “Arsibalt, if you keep running your mouth this way, Fraa Lodoghir will have to erase everyone’s memory!”

  “Memory of what?” Lio said. “I don’t remember anything.”

  “Then it is not because of any Rhetor sorcery,” called out Fraa Lodoghir, “but because failed attempts at wit fade so quickly from the memory.”

  “What are you people talking about!?” demanded Yul, in Fluccish. “You’re spooking the superstars.”

  “We’re talking about what it all means,” I said. “Why we’re the same as them.”

  “Maybe they are weirder than you think,” Yul suggested.

  “Until they let us visit Orb One, we’ll never know.”

  “So go to Orb One,” Yul said.

  “He’s already been there,” Jesry cracked.

  We reached the bottom and climbed down an airlock-shaft just like the others and found ourselves looking straight down on the houseboat-mat of Orb Four. This had an elliptical pool of open water in the middle: a touch of luxury we hadn’t seen in any of the Laterran orbs. Perhaps the Urnudans had agriculture even more productive than the others, and could afford to waste a bit of space on decoration. The pool was surrounded by a plaza, much of which was now covered with tables.

  “It is a center for the holding of meetings,” Jules explained.

  My mind went straight back to Arsibalt’s complaints about the banality. The aliens have conference centers!

  They had welded stairs to their sky, and painted them blue. We clanked down them, getting heavier as we went. The architecture of the houseboats below was not markedly different from what we’d seen in the Laterran orbs. There were only so many ways to build a flat-roofed structure that could float. Many of the decorative flourishes that might distinguish one style of architecture from another were buried under cataracts of fruit-bearing vines and layered canopies of orchard-trees. Our path across the houseboat complex was a narrow, but straight and unmistakable, boulevard to the elliptical pool; here, we did not ramble from one terrace to the next. Still, we did encounter the occasional Urnudan pedestrian, and as I looked at their faces I tried to resist the temptation to perceive them as mere rough drafts of superior beings from higher up the Wick. As we drew near and passed them by, they averted their gaze, got out of our way, and stood patiently in what looked to me like submissive postures.

  “How much of what we’re seeing is native Urnudan culture,” I wondered out loud to Lio, who had fallen in step next to me, “and how much is a consequence of living on a military spaceship for a thousand years?”

  “Same difference, maybe,” Lio pointed out, “since only the Urnudans built ships like this in the first place.”

  The boulevard debouched into the plaza surrounding the meeting pool. This—as we had clearly seen from above—was partitioned into four quadrants of equal size. In turn, it was enclosed by four glass-walled pavilions that curved around it like eyebrows.

  “Check out the weatherstripping on the doors!” Yul remarked, nodding at a pavilion entrance. “Those things are aquariums.” And indeed, through the glass walls we could see Fthosians, who were not equipped with nose tubes, speed-walking with documents or talking into their versions of jeejahs. “They check their breathing gear at the door,” Cord observed, and pointed to a rack just inside that heavily weatherstripped door where dozens of tank-packs had been hung up.

  Jesry nudged me. “Translators!” he said, and pointed to a windowed mezzanine above the main deck of the “aquarium.” A few Fthosian men and women, fiddling with headsets, sat at consoles that overlooked the pool. And as if to confirm this, Urnudan stewards began to circulate through our delegation carrying trays of earbuds: red for Orth, blue for Fluccish. I stuffed a red one into my ear and heard in it the familiar tones of Jules Ve
rne Durand. With a quick look around, I picked him out in the translators’ booth atop the Laterran pavilion. “The Command welcomes the Arbran delegation and requests that you gather at the water’s edge for opening ceremonies,” he was saying. I got the impression, from his tone of voice, that he’d already said it a hundred times.

  We had joined up with a part of the Arbran contingent that had arrived earlier to get things sorted before the stars, journalists, and space commandos showed up to make it complicated. Ala was one of those. The Panjandrums and their aides had also preceded us, and were waiting near the water’s edge in an inflated poly bubble the size of a housing module, just off to our left as we emerged from the boulevard. Behind it was a clutter of equipment including compressed air tanks that must have been brought up on the ship from Arbre. So this was meant to be a makeshift pavilion, symbolically placing our Panjandrums on the same footing as the Geometer dignitaries. It was made of the same kind of milky poly sheeting that had covered the windows of my quarantine trailer at Tredegarh. I could make out vague shapes of dark-suited figures around a table—I thought of them as doyns—and others, servitors, hovering round the edges or darting in to handle documents.

  I spent a while watching Ala run in and out of that tent, sometimes gazing off at the fake sky as she talked on a headset, other times peeling it off her head and holding her hand over the microphone as she talked to someone face to face. I was overcome by recollection of the time she and I had spent together that morning, and could not think of much else. I thought that I was like a man lame in one leg, who had learned to move about well enough that all awareness of his disability had passed out of his mind. And yet, when he tried to go on a journey, he kept finding himself back where he had started, since his weak leg made him go in circles. But if he found a partner who was weak in the other leg, and the two of them set out as companions…

  Cord goosed me. I nearly toppled into the water and she had to pull me back by my bolt.

  “She’s beautiful,” she said before I could get huffy.

  “Yeah. Thanks. She most definitely is,” I said. “She’s the one for me.”

  “Have you told her?”

  “Yeah. Actually telling her isn’t the problem. You can ease up on me as far as telling her is concerned.”

  “Oh. Good.”

  “The problem is all of these other circumstances.”

  “They are some pretty interesting circumstances!”

  “I’m sorry you got swept up in it like this. It’s not what I wanted.”

  “But it was never about what you wanted,” she said. “Look, cuz, even if I croak, it was a good trade.”

  “How can you say that, Cord, what about—”

  She shook her head, reached out, and put her fingertips to my lips. “No. Stop. We are not discussing it.”

  I took her hand between mine and held it for a moment. “Okay,” I said, “it’s your life. I’ll shut up.”

  “Don’t just shut up. Believe it, cuz.”

  “HEY!” called a gruff voice. “What do you think you’re doing, holding hands with my girl?”

  “Hey Yul, what have you been up to since Ecba?”

  “Time went by fast,” he said, ambling closer and standing behind Cord, who leaned comfortably against him. “We got a lot of free aerocraft rides. Saw the world. Spent a lot of time answering questions. After three days, I laid down the law. Said I wouldn’t answer any question I had answered already. They took it hard, at first. Forced them to get organized. But after that, it was better for everyone. They put us up in a hotel in the capital.”

  “An actual hotel,” Cord wanted me to understand, “not a casino.”

  “Days would go by with nothing—we’d go see museums,” Yul said. “Then all of a sudden they’d get excited and call us back in, and we’d spend a few hours trying to remember whether the buttons on the control panel were round or square.”

  “They even hypnotized us,” Cord said.

  “Then someone ratted us out to the media,” Yul said bleakly, and cast a wary look round for the man with the speelycaptor. “Less said about that, the better.”

  “They moved us to a place just outside Tredegarh, then, for a couple of days,” Cord said.

  “Right before they blew the walls,” Yul added. “Then we Anti-swarmed to an old missile base in the desert. I liked that. No media. Lots of hiking.” He sighed helplessly. “But now we’re here. No hiking in this place.”

  “Did they give you anything before you boarded the ship?”

  “Like a big pill?” Yul said. “Like this?” He held out his hand, the Everything Killer resting in the middle of his palm. I jerked my hand out and clasped his and shook it. He looked surprised. When we let go, I made sure that pill was in my hand.

  “You want mine?” Cord said. “They said it was a tracking device—for our safety. But I didn’t want to be tracked, and, well—”

  “If you wanted safety you wouldn’t have come,” I said.

  “Exactly.” She handed me her pill, a little more discreetly than Yul had done.

  “What are they really?” Yul asked. I was drawing up a lie when I happened to glance up, and saw him looking at me in a way that said he would brook no deception.

  “Weapons,” I mouthed. Yul nodded and looked away. Cord looked nauseated. I took my leave, tucking the pills into a fold of my bolt, for I had just noticed Emman Beldo emerging from the inflatable with an aide of, to judge from body language, lesser stature. I yanked out my earbud and tossed it aside. Emman saw me headed his way and told the other to get lost. I met him at the edge of the pool.

  “Just a second,” were his first words. Around his neck he had a little electronic device on a lanyard. He turned it on and it began to talk, emitting random syllables and word-fragments in Orth. It sounded like Emman and a couple of other people, recorded and run through a blender. “What is it?” I asked, and before I had reached the end of this short utterance my own voice had been thrown into the blender too. I answered my own question: “A means of defeating surveillance,” I said, “so we can talk freely.”

  He made no sign that I was right or wrong, but only looked at me interestedly. “You’ve been through some changes,” he pointed out, making an effort to speak distinctly above the murmur of Emman-and Erasmas-gibberish.

  I peeled back my bolt fold and let him see what I’d collected from Yul and Cord. “Under what circumstances,” I said, “are you planning to turn these on?”

  “Under the circumstance that I am given the order to do so,” he answered, with a glance back toward the tent.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “It is clearly a measure of last resort,” Emman said, “when diplomacy fails and it looks like we are about to be killed or taken hostage.”

  “I just wonder whether the Panjandrums are even competent to render such judgments,” I said.

  “I know paying attention to Saecular politics isn’t your game,” he said, “but it has gotten a little better since our gracious hosts threw the Warden of Heaven out the airlock. And even more so since the Antiswarm started throwing its weight around.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t know about that, would I?” I pointed out. “Since I’ve been otherwise engaged the last two weeks.”

  Emman snorted. “No kidding! Nice job, by the way.”

  “Thanks. Some day I’ll tell you stories. But for now—just how, exactly, did the Antiswarm throw its weight around?”

  “They didn’t have to say much,” Emman told me. “It was obvious.”

  “What was?”

  He took a deep breath, sighed it out. “Look. Thirty-seven hundred years ago, the avout were herded into maths because of fear of their ability to change the world through praxis.” He nodded helpfully at where I had tucked the Everything Killers. “Because of clever stunts like that, I guess. So praxis stopped, or at least slowed down to a rate of change that could be understood, managed, controlled. Fine—until these guys showed up.” He raised his head a
nd gazed around. “Turned out that all we’d been doing was losing the arms race to cosmi that hadn’t imposed any such limits on their avout. And guess what? When Arbre decided to fight back a little, who delivered the counterpunch? Our military? The Saecular Power? Nope. You guys in the bolts and chords. So the Antiswarm has garnered a lot of clout just by doing a lot and saying very little. Hence the concept of the two Magisteria, which is—”

  “I’ve heard of it,” I said.

  He and I stood there for a few moments, gazing across the elliptical pond at the opposite shore, where processions of Urnudan and Troän dignitaries were emerging from their pavilions, making their way toward the water. The garble-box around Emman’s neck, however, did not know how to shut up.

  “So that is the Narrative everyone is working with now?” I asked him.

  He looked at me alertly. “I guess you could think of it that way.”

  “Well,” I said, “if this thing goes all pear-shaped and some Panjandrum gives you the order to activate the EKs, it’d be a shame if that Panjandrum and you turned out to have the Narrative all wrong, wouldn’t it?”

  “What do you mean?” he asked sharply.

  “Thirty-seven hundred years ago they rounded us up, yeah. But they didn’t take away our ability to mess with newmatter. In consequence of which, we had the First Sack. Fine. No more newmatter, except for a few exemptions that got grandfathered in: factories where the stuff still gets made, staffed by ex-avout who get Evoked when they are needed. Time passes. We’re still allowed to do sequence manipulation. Things get a little spooky. There’s a Second Sack. No more sequence work, no more syndevs in the concents, except for a few exemptions that get grandfathered in: the Ita, the clocks, the page trees, and the library grapes, and maybe some labs on the outside, staffed by skeleton crews of Evoked and concent-trained praxics like you. Fine. Things are under control now, right? Not much the avout can do if they have nothing, no syndevs, no tools at all except for rakes and shovels, and are being watched over by an Inquisition. Now we’re really under the Saecular Power’s thumb—until two and half millennia later, when it turns out that sufficiently smart people locked up on crags with nothing to do but think can actually come up with forms of praxis that require no tools and are all the more terrifying for that. So we have a Third Sack—the worst of all, much more savage than the others. Seventy years later the mathic world gets reëstablished. But, you have to ask yourself the obvious question…”