Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  “What got grandfathered in?” Emman said, completing the sentence for me. “What were the special exemptions?” And then there was silence except for the babble coming out of his jammer. Each of us was waiting for the other to finish the sentence—to answer the question. I hoped he might know—and that he might be so forthcoming as to share the answer with me. But from the look on his face it was plain that this was not the case.

  So I had to follow the logic myself. Fortunately, Magnath and Ignetha Foral chose this moment to come down to the water’s edge—as it had become obvious that something was about to happen. I looked at them, and Emman Beldo looked with me.

  “Those guys,” he said.

  “Those guys,” I affirmed.

  “The Lineage?”

  “Not exactly the Lineage—since that goes all the way back to the time of Metekoranes—but a kind of Saecular incarnation of it, a dowment that was established and funded around the time of the Third Sack. Tied into the mathic world in all sorts of ways. Owns Ecba and Elkhazg and probably other places besides.”

  “Maybe it looks that way to you,” Emman said, “but I can promise you that most of what you call the Panjandrums have never heard of this dowment. It is nothing to them—exerts no influence. Magnath Foral—if they’ve heard his name at all—is just a dried-up, blue-blooded art collector.”

  “But that’s how it would happen,” I said. “They would set this thing up after the Third Sack. It would be famous and influential for about ten minutes. But after a few wars, revolutions, and Dark Ages, it would be forgotten. It would become what it is.”

  “And what is it?” Emman asked me.

  “I’m still trying to figure that out,” I said. “But I think that what I’m saying is that—”

  “We Saeculars are in over our heads here?” Emman suggested. “I’m comfortable with you saying that.”

  “But are you comfortable with the practical consequence,” I asked him, “which is—”

  “That if I get the order,” he said, with a flick of the eyes at the place where I’d secreted the Everything Killers, “maybe I should ignore it, because it was issued by a clueless Saecular who has been working from the wrong Narrative?”

  “Exactly,” I said. And I noticed him rubbing his jeejah with his thumb. He had gotten a new jeejah since Tredegarh. Most unusual. From hanging around with Cord, I knew some of the terminology: Emman’s jeejah had been milled from a solid billet of alloy, not molded in poly or stamped out of sheet material. Very expensive. Not mass-produced.

  “Nice, huh?” He’d caught me looking.

  “I’ve seen one before,” I said.

  “Where?” he asked sharply.

  “Jad had one.”

  “How could you know that? It was issued to him immediately before the launch. He burned up before you could talk to him.”

  I just stared at him, hardly knowing where to begin.

  “Is this one of those in-over-my-head things?” he asked.

  “More or less. Tell me, how many more of those things?”

  “Up here? At least one.” And he turned his head toward the inflatable. The outer door of its airlock had been unzipped, and a series of men and women in impressive clothes were emerging, patting their heads self-consciously as they got used to the feel of their nose-tubes. “The third one—the bald man—has one just like it.”

  My right arm departed the conversation. Ala had made off with it. The rest of me caught up just in time to avoid dislocation of the shoulder joint. “You should wear your earbud,” she told me, “then you’d know we’re in the middle of an aut!” She slapped a bud into my hand and I wormed it into my ear. Music had begun to play from a band on the other side of the ellipse. I looked across and saw four long boxes—coffins—being borne down to the water’s edge by a mixed contingent of Urnudan, Troän, Laterran, and Fthosian soldiers.

  Ala led me round behind the inflatable, where Arsibalt, Jesry, and Lio were standing at three corners of another coffin. “For once, I’m not the latest!” Lio said wonderingly.

  “Leadership has changed you,” I said, and reported to my corner. We picked up the coffin, which I knew must contain the remains of Lise.

  All of these coffins smacked me into a whole different frame of mind. We carried Lise out from behind the inflatable, centered her in the road that led to the water’s edge, and set her down as we waited for the procession on the opposite side to finish. The music, of course, sounded strange to our ears, but no stranger than a lot of stuff you might hear on Arbre. Music, it seemed, was one of those places where the Hylaean Flow was especially strong—com-posers in different cosmi were hearing the same things in their heads. It was a funeral march. Very slow and grim. Hard to say whether this was a reflection of Urnudan culture, or a sort of reminder that the four in those coffins had slain a lot of Geometers and that we’d best keep that in mind before we got to celebrating them.

  It almost worked. I actually started to feel guilty for having delivered the Valers to the Daban Urnud. Then I happened to glance down at the coffin beside my knee, and wondered who up here had shot Jules’s wife in the back. Who had given the order to rod Ecba? Who was responsible for killing Orolo? Was he or she standing around this pool? Not the sorts of things I should have been thinking at a peace conference. But there wouldn’t have been a need for one if we hadn’t been killing each other.

  The soldiers carried the coffins of Osa, Esma, Vay, and Gratho quite slowly, stopping for a few beats after each pace. My mind wandered, as it always did during long auts, and I found myself thinking about those four Valers, recalling my first impressions of them in Mahsht, when I’d been cornered, and hadn’t understood, yet, what they were. The scenes played in my head like speelies: Osa, perched one-legged atop the sphere that sheltered me, fending off attackers with snap-kicks. Esma dancing across the plaza toward the sniper while Gratho made his body into a bullet-shield for me. Vay fixing me up afterwards—so efficiently, so ruthlessly that snot had run out of my nose and tears from my eyes.

  Were doing so, for I was weeping now. Trying to imagine their last moments. Especially Suur Vay, out on the icosahedron, in single combat against several terrified men with cutting tools. Alone, in the dark, the blue face of Arbre thousands of miles away, knowing in the last moments she’d never breathe its air again, never hear the thousand brooks of the Ringing Vale.

  “Raz?” It was Ala’s voice. She had her hand—more gently, this time—on my elbow. I wiped my face dry with my bolt, got a moment’s clear view before things got all misty again. The honor guard across the pool had set the Valers’ coffins down and were standing there expectantly. “Time to go,” Ala said. Lio, Jesry, and Arsibalt were all looking at me, all crying too. We all bent our knees, got a grip on the coffin, raised it off the deck.

  “Sing something,” Ala suggested. We looked at her helplessly until she said the name of a chant that we used for the aut of Requiem at Edhar. Arsibalt started it, giving us the pitch in his clear tenor, and we all joined in with our parts. We all had to do some improvising, but few noticed and none cared. As we came out in view of the Laterran pavilion, Jules Verne Durand went off the air. I glanced up through the windows of the translators’ booth and saw other Laterrans rushing to his side to lay hands on him. We all sang louder.

  “So much for the Orth translation,” Jesry said, once we had reached the water and set Lise down. But he said it in a simple and plaintive way that did not make me want to hurt him.

  “It’s okay,” Lio said, “that’s the good thing about an aut. The words don’t matter.” And he rested his hand absent-mindedly on the lid of the coffin.

  The soldiers on the opposite bank transferred the coffins of the Valers onto a sort of flatboat. They could simply have marched them around to us, but there seemed to be something in the act of crossing the water that was of ceremonial meaning here. “I get it,” Arsibalt said, “it represents the cosmos. The gulf between us.” There was more music. The raft was staffed by
four women in robes, who began rowing it across. The music was much easier on the ears than the funeral march: different instruments with softer tones, and a solo by a Laterran woman who stood at the edge of the water and seemed to make the whole orb resonate with the power of her voice. It was a good going-home piece, I reckoned.

  When the ladies were halfway finished rowing across, Jesry spoke up: “Not setting any speed records, are they?”

  “Yeah,” Lio said, “I was just thinking the same thing. Give us a boat! We could take ’em!”

  It wasn’t that funny, but our bodies thought it was, and we had to do a lot of work in the next couple of minutes trying to avoid laughing so obviously as to create a diplomatic incident. When the boat finally arrived, we took the coffins off, then loaded Lise’s on board. To the accompaniment of more music, those slow-rowing ladies took her in a long arc to the Laterran shore, where she was brought off by half a dozen civilian pallbearers—friends of Jules and of Lise, I guessed—while Jules, supported by a couple of friends, looked on. Then in four separate trips we carried the Valers’ coffins back to the staging area behind the inflatable. Meanwhile Lise was conveyed into the Laterran pavilion so that Jules could have a private moment with her. The oar-ladies rowed back to the Urnudan shore. Fraa Lodoghir and Gan Odru, from opposite sides of the pond, each said a few words reminding us about the others who had died in the little war that we had come here to conclude: on Arbre, the ones who had been killed in the rod attacks, and up here, the ones who had fallen to the Valers.

  After a moment of silence, we broke for an intermission, and food and drinks were brought out on trays by stewards. Apparently, the need to eat after a funeral was as universal as the Adrakhonic Theorem. The boat ladies went to work refitting their barge with a table, draped with blue cloth, and arrayed with piles of documents.

  “Raz.”

  I had been waiting for my crack at a food tray, but turned around to discover Emman a few paces away, just in the act of underhanding something to me. Reflexes took over and I pawed it out of the air. It was another one of those conversation-jamming machines.

  “I stole it from a Procian,” he explained.

  “Won’t the Procian be needing it?” I asked, my face—I hoped—the picture of mock concern.

  “Nah. Redundant.”

  The conversation jammer turned into a conversation piece, as my friends gathered round to play with it and chuckle at the funny sounds it made. Yul got it to generate random, profane sentences by cursing into it. But after a few minutes, the voice of Jules Verne Durand—hoarse, but composed—was in our ears telling us that the next phase of the aut was about to begin. Once again we convened at the water’s edge and heard speeches from the four leaders who would be putting pens to paper in a few minutes: first Gan Odru. Then Prag Eshwar: a stocky woman, more grand-auntish than I had envisioned, in a military uniform. Then the Arbran foreign minister, and finally one of the Thousanders who had been hanging around with Fraa Lodoghir. As each of the speakers finished, they stepped aboard the barge. When our Thousander had joined the first three, the oar-ladies rowed them out into the middle. They all took up pens and began to sign. All watched in silence for a few moments. But the signing was lengthy, and so, soon enough, people began muttering to one another. Conversations flourished all over, and people began to mill around.

  It might sound like an odd thing to do, but I strayed around behind the inflatable and counted the coffins. One, two, three, four.

  “Taking inventory?”

  I turned around to find that Fraa Lodoghir had followed me.

  I flicked on the conversation jammer, which emitted a stream of profanity in Yul’s voice as I said, “It’s the only way for me to be sure who is still dead.”

  “You can be sure now,” he said. “It’s over. The tally will not change.”

  “Can you bring people back as well as make them disappear?”

  “Not without undoing that.” He nodded at the barge where they were signing the peace.

  “I see,” I said.

  “You were hoping to get Saunt Orolo back?” he asked gently.

  “Yes.”

  Lodoghir said nothing. But I was able to work it out for myself. “But if Orolo’s alive, it means Lise is buried at Ecba. We don’t get the intelligence gleaned from her remains—none of this happens. Peace is only compatible with Lise and Orolo being dead—and staying that way.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lodoghir said. “There are certain worldtracks—certain states of affairs—that are only compatible with certain persons’ being…absent.”

  “That’s the word Fraa Jad used,” I said, “before he turned up absent.”

  Fraa Lodoghir looked as if steeling himself to hear some sophomoric outburst from me. I continued, “How about Fraa Jad? Any chance he’ll be present again?”

  “His tragic demise is extensively recorded,” said Fraa Lodoghir, “but I’d not presume to say what an Incanter is and is not capable of.” And his gaze fell away from my face and traveled across the milling crowd until it had come to rest, or so I thought, on Magnath Foral. For once, the Heritor of Elkhazg did not have Madame Secretary at his side—she was tending to official duties—and so I walked directly over to him.

  “Did you—did we—summon them here?” I asked him. “Did we call the Urnudans forth? Or is it the case that some Urnudan, a thousand years ago, saw a geometric proof in a dream, and turned that into a religion—decided that he had been called to a higher world?”

  Magnath Foral heard me out, then turned his face toward the water, drawing my attention to the peace that was being signed there. “Behold,” he said. “There are two Arbrans on that vessel, of coequal dignity. Such a state of affairs has not existed since the golden age of Ethras. The walls of Tredegarh have been brought down. The avout have escaped from their prisons. Ita mingle and work by their sides. If all of these things had occurred as the result of a summoning such as you suppose, would it not be a great thing for the Lineage to have brought about? Oh, I should very much like to claim such credit. Long have my predecessors and I waited for such a culmination. What honors would decorate the Lineage were it all true! But it did not come to pass in any such clean and straightforward manner. I do not know the answer, Fraa Erasmas. Nor will any born of this cosmos until we have taken ship on a vessel such as this, and journeyed on to the next.”

  Part 13

  RECONSTITUTION

  Upsight: A sudden, usually unlooked-for moment of clear understanding.

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

  The need for stakes was insatiable. Our volunteers were fashioning them from anything they could find: reinforcing bar cut from buildings that had been splashed across the landscape, twisted angle irons sawed from toppled gantries, splinters of blown-apart trees. Lashed into bundles, they piled up before the flaps of my tent and threatened to block me in.

  “I need to deliver those to the survey team on the rim,” I said, “would you like to walk with me?”

  Artisan Quin had been sitting in a fetch for six days with Barb. My proposal sounded good to him. We pushed through mildewy canvas and came out into the white light of an overcast morning. Each of us shouldered as many stake-bundles as he thought he could carry, and we began to trudge uphill. Our early trails down from the rim had already been turned into gullies by erosion, so new arrivals were cutting terraces and properly switchbacked paths into the dirt. Hard work, and a good way to sort mere vacationers from those who would stick it out and make their livings at Orolo.

  “The first draft of everything is going to be wood and earth,” I told him, as we passed by a mixed team of avout and Saeculars pounding sharpened logs into the ground. “By the time I die, we should have a rough idea of how the place works. Later generations can begin planning how to do it all over again in stone.”

  Quin looked dismayed for a moment. Then his face relaxed as he understood that I was talking about dying of old age. “Where are you going to get the stone fro
m?” he asked. “All I see is mud.”

  I stopped and turned back to face the crater. It had filled with water as soon as it had cooled down, and so, with the altitude we’d already gained, we could easily see its general shape: an ellipse, oriented northwest to southeast—the direction in which the rod had been traveling. We were above its southeastern end. Its most obvious feature was an island of rubble that rose from the brown water a few hundred yards offshore. But I directed his attention to a barely visible notch in the coastline, miles away. “The river that filled it spills in over yonder, near the other end,” I said. “It’s not easy to make out from here. But if you go up that river a couple of miles, you come to a place where the impact touched off a landslide that exposed a face of limestone. Enough for our descendants to build whatever they want.”

  Quin nodded, and we resumed climbing. He was silent for a while. Finally he asked, “Are you going to have descendants?”

  I laughed. “It’s already happening! People started getting pregnant during the Antiswarm. We started eating normal food and the men stopped being sterile. The first avout baby was born last week. I heard about it on the Reticulum. Oh, you’ll find our access is a little spotty. For a while Sammann—he’s our ex-Ita—was keeping it running all by himself. But more ex-Ita show up here every day. We have a couple of dozen now.”

  Quin wasn’t interested in that part of it. He interrupted me: “So, Barb could one day be a father.”

  “Yes. He could.” Then—better late than never—I worked out the implication: “You could be a grandfather.”

  Quin picked up the pace—suddenly eager to get Saunt Orolo’s constructed now. Huffing along in his wake, I added: “Of course, that raises the ancient breeding issue. But we know enough now that we can prevent a forking of the race into two species. It puts some responsibility on us to make places like this welcoming for what we used to call extras.”