Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  Arsibalt looked as rattled as I felt. This had started as a joke. Now, Fraa Orolo was trying to get at something serious—but we couldn’t make out what.

  “Aside from supernovae, very bright objects tend to be nearby—within the solar system—and things in the solar system are, by and large, confined to the plane of the ecliptic. So, Fraa Orolo, in this absurd fantasy of me running to the starhenge to look at the sky in broad daylight, I’d have to slew the M & M from its current polar orientation to the plane of the ecliptic in order to have a chance of actually seeing anything.”

  “I just want your absurd fantasy to be internally consistent,” Fraa Orolo explained.

  “Well, are you happy with it now?”

  He shrugged. “Your point is well reasoned. But don’t be too dismissive of the poles. Many things converge there.”

  “Like what? Lines of longitude?” I scoffed.

  Arsibalt, in similar spirit: “Migratory birds?”

  Jesry: “Compass needles?”

  Then a higher-pitched voice broke in. “Polar orbits.”

  We turned and saw Barb coming toward us with a tray of food. He must have been listening with one ear as he stood in line. Now he was giving the answer to the riddle in a pre-adolescent voice that could have been heard from Bly’s Butte. It was such an odd thing to say that it had turned heads all over the Refectory. “By definition,” he continued, in the singsong voice he used when he was rattling off something he had memorized from a book, “a satellite in a polar orbit must cross over each of the poles during each revolution around Arbre.”

  Orolo stuffed a piece of gravy-sopped bread into his mouth to hide his amusement. Barb was now standing right next to me with his tray a few inches from my ear, but he made no move to sit down.

  I had the feeling I was being watched. I looked over at Fraa Corlandin a few tables distant, just in the act of glancing away. But he could still hear Barb: “A telescope aimed north would have a high probability of detecting—”

  I yanked down on a loose fold of his bolt. One arm dropped. All the food slid to that end of his tray and threw it out of balance. He lost control and it all avalanched to the floor.

  All heads turned our way. Barb stood amazed. “My arm was acted on by a force of unknown origin!” he stated.

  “Terribly sorry, it was my fault,” I said. Barb was fascinated by the mess on the floor. Knowing by now how his mind worked, I rose, squared off in front of him, and put my hands on his shoulders. “Barb, look at me,” I said.

  He looked at me.

  “This was my fault. I got tangled up with your bolt.”

  “You should clean it up, if it was your fault,” he said matter-of-factly.

  “I agree and that is what I shall do now,” I said. I went off to fetch a bucket. Behind me I could hear Jesry asking Barb a question about conic sections.

  * * *

  Calca: (1) In Proto-and Old Orth, chalk or any other such substance used to make marks on hard surfaces. (2) In Middle and later Orth, a calculation, esp. one that consumes a large amount of chalk because of its tedious and detailed nature. (3) In Praxic and later Orth, an explanation, definition, or lesson that is instrumental in developing some larger theme, but that, because of its overly technical, long-winded, or recondite nature, has been moved aside from the main body of the dialog and encapsulated in a footnote or appendix so as not to divert attention from the main line of the argument.

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

  One form of drudgery led straight into another as Suur Ala helpfully reminded me that it was my day to clean up the kitchen following the midday meal. I hadn’t been at it for long before I noticed that Barb was in there with me, just following me around, making no move to help. Which irked me at first: yet another case of his almost perfect social cluelessness. But once I got over that, I decided it was better that way. Some things were easier to do alone. Communicating and coordinating with others was often more trouble than it was worth. Many tried to help anyway because they thought it was the polite thing to do, or because it was an avenue for social bonding. Barb’s thinking wasn’t muddled by any such considerations. Instead, he talked to me, which in my view was preferable to being “helped.”

  “Orbits are about as much fun as what you are doing,” he observed gravely, watching me get down on my knees and reach elbow-deep into a grease-choked drain.

  “I gather that Grandsuur Ylma has been teaching you about such things,” I grunted. Drain-cleaning made it easy to hide my chagrin. I hadn’t learned about orbits until my second year. This was Barb’s second month.

  “A lot of xs and ys and zs!” he exclaimed, which forced a laugh out of me.

  “Yes,” I said, “quite a few.”

  “You want to know what’s stupid?”

  “Sure, Barb. Lay it on me,” I said, hauling a fistful of vegetable trimmings up out of the drain against the back-pressure of twenty gallons of dammed-up dishwater. The drain gargled and began to empty.

  “Any sline could stand out on the meadow at night and see some satellites in polar orbits, and other satellites in orbits around the equator, and know that those were two different kinds of orbits!” he exclaimed. “But if you work out the xs and ys and zs of it, guess what?”

  “What?”

  “They just look like a lot of xs and ys and zs, and it is not as obvious that some are polar and some are equatorial as it would be to any old dumb sline looking up into the sky!”

  “Worse than that,” I pointed out, “staring at the xs and ys and zs doesn’t even tell you that they are orbits.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “An orbit is a stationary, stable thing,” I said. “The satellite’s moving all the time, of course, but always in the same way. But that kind of stability is in no way shown by the xs and ys and zs.”

  “Yeah! It’s like knowing all of the theorics only makes us stupider!” he laughed excitedly, and cast a theatrical glance over his shoulder, as if we were up to something incredibly mischievous.

  “Ylma is having you work it out in the most gruesome way possible,” I said, “using Saunt Lesper’s Coordinates, so that when she teaches you how it’s really done, it’ll seem that much easier.”

  Barb was dumbfounded. I went on, “Like hitting yourself in the head with a hammer—it feels so good when you stop.” This was the oldest joke in the world, but Barb hadn’t heard it before, and he became so amused that he got physically excited and had to run back and forth across the kitchen several times to flame off energy. A few weeks ago I would have been alarmed by this and would have tried to calm him down, but now I was used to it, and knew that if I approached him physically things would get much worse.

  “What’s the right way to do it?”

  “Orbital elements,” I said. “Six numbers that tell you everything that can be known about how a satellite is moving.”

  “But I already have those six numbers.”

  “What are they?” I asked, testing him.

  “The satellite’s position on Saunt Lesper’s x, y, and z axes. That’s three numbers. And its velocity along each one of those axes. That’s three more. Six numbers.”

  “But as you pointed out you can look at those six numbers and still not be able to visualize the orbit, or even know that it is an orbit. What I am telling you is that with some more theorics you can turn them into a different list of six numbers, the orbital elements, that are infinitely easier to work with, in that you can glance at them and know right away whether the orbit goes over the poles or around the equator.”

  “Why didn’t Grandsuur Ylma tell me that to begin with?”

  I couldn’t tell him, because you learn too damned fast. But if I tried to be overly diplomatic, Barb would see through it and plane me.

  Then I had an upsight: it was my responsibility, just as much as it was Ylma’s, to teach fids the right stuff at the right time.

  “You are now ready to stop working in Saunt Lesper’s Coordinate
s,” I announced, “and begin working in other kinds of spaces, the way real, grown-up theors do.”

  “Is this like parallel dimensions?” said Barb, who apparently had been watching the same kinds of speelies as I had before coming here.

  “No. These spaces I’m talking about aren’t like physical spaces that you can measure with a ruler and move around in. They are abstract theorical spaces that follow different rules, called action principles. The space that cosmographers like to use has six dimensions: one for each of the orbital elements. But that’s a special-purpose tool, only used in that discipline. A more general one was developed early in the Praxic Age by Saunt Hemn…” And I went on to give Barb a calca* about Hemn spaces, or configuration spaces, which Hemn had invented when he, like Barb, had become sick of xs and ys and zs.

  * * *

  to go Hundred: (Derogatory slang) To lose one’s mind, to become mentally unsound, to stray irredeemably from the path of theorics. The expression can be traced to the Third Centennial Apert, when the gates of several Hundreder maths opened to reveal startling outcomes, e.g.: at Saunt Rambalf’s, a mass suicide that had taken place only moments earlier. At Saunt Terramore’s, nothing at all—not even human remains. At Saunt Byadin’s, a previously unheard-of religious sect calling themselves the Matarrhites (still in existence). At Saunt Lesper’s, no humans, but a previously undiscovered species of tree-dwelling higher primates. At Saunt Phendra’s, a crude nuclear reactor in a system of subterranean catacombs. These and other mishaps prompted the creation of the Inquisition and the institution of hierarchs in their modern forms, including Wardens Regulant with power to inspect and impose discipline in all maths.

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

  I caught up with Fraa Orolo late in the afternoon as he was coming out of a chalk hall, and we stood among page-stuffed pigeonholes and chatted. I knew better than to ask him what he had been getting at earlier with his weird discussion of daytime cosmography. Once he had made up his mind to teach us in that mode, there was no way to get him to say the answer straight out. Anyway, I was more worried about the things he had been referring to earlier. “Listen, you’re not thinking of leaving, are you?”

  He got a slightly amused look but said nothing.

  “I always worried you were going to go into the labyrinth and become a Hundreder. That would be bad enough. But the way you were talking I got the idea you were going to go become a Feral like Estemard.”

  This was Orolo’s idea of an answer: “What does it mean that you worry so much?”

  I sighed.

  “Describe worrying,” he went on.

  “What!?”

  “Pretend I’m someone who has never worried. I’m mystified. I don’t get it. Tell me how to worry.”

  “Well…I guess the first step is to envision a sequence of events as they might play out in the future.”

  “But I do that all the time. And yet I don’t worry.”

  “It is a sequence of events with a bad end.”

  “So, you’re worried that a pink dragon will fly over the concent and fart nerve gas on us?”

  “No,” I said with a nervous chuckle.

  “I don’t get it,” Orolo claimed, deadpan. “That is a sequence of events with a bad end.”

  “But it’s nonsensical. There are no nerve-gas-farting pink dragons.”

  “Fine,” he said, “a blue one, then.”

  Jesry had wandered by and noticed that Orolo and I were in dialog, so he approached, but not too close, and took up a spectator’s position: hands folded in his bolt, chin down, not making eye contact.

  “It has nothing to do with the dragon’s color,” I protested. “Nerve-gas-farting dragons don’t exist.”

  “How do you know?”

  “One has never been seen.”

  “But I have never been seen to leave the concent—yet you worry about that.”

  “All right. Correction: the whole idea of such a dragon is incoherent. There are no evolutionary precedents. Probably no metabolic pathways anywhere in nature that could generate nerve gas. Animals that large can’t fly because of basic scaling laws. And so on.”

  “Hmm, all sorts of reasons from biology, chemistry, theorics…I suppose then that the slines, who know nothing of such matters, must worry about pink nerve-gas-farting dragons all the time?”

  “You could probably talk them into worrying about it. But no, there’s a…there’s some kind of filter that kicks in…” I pondered it for a moment, and shot a glance at Jesry, inviting him to join us. After a few moments he took his hands out of his cloak and stepped forward. “If you worried about pink ones,” he pointed out, “you’d have to worry about blue, green, black, spotted, and striped ones. And not just nerve-gas farters but bomb droppers and fire belchers.”

  “Not just dragons but worms, giant turtles, lizards…” I added.

  “And not just physical entities but gods, spirits, and so on,” Jesry said. “As soon as you open the door wide enough to admit pink nerve-gas-farting dragons, you have let in all of those other possibilities as well.”

  “Why not worry about all of them, then?” asked Fraa Orolo.

  “I do!” claimed Arsibalt, who had seen us talking, and come over to find out what was going on.

  “Fraa Erasmas,” said Orolo, “you said a minute ago that it would be possible to talk slines into worrying about a pink nerve-gas-farting dragon. How would you go about it?”

  “Well, I’m not a Procian. But if I were, I suppose I’d tell the slines some sort of convincing story that explained where the dragons had come from. And at the end of it, they’d be plenty worried. But if Jesry burst in warning them about a striped, fire-belching turtle, why, they’d cart him off to the loony bin!”

  Everyone laughed—even Jesry, who as a rule didn’t like jokes made at his expense.

  “What would make your story convincing?” Orolo asked.

  “Well, it’d have to be internally consistent. And it would also have to be consistent with what every sline already knew of the real world.”

  “How so?”

  Lio and Tulia were on their way to the Refectory kitchen, where it was their turn to prepare dinner. Lio, having heard the last few lines, chimed in: “You could claim that shooting stars were dragon farts that had been lit on fire!”

  “Very good,” said Orolo. “Then, whenever a sline looked up and saw a shooting star, he’d think it was corroboration for the pink dragon myth.”

  “And he could refute Jesry,” Lio said, “by saying ‘you idiot, what do striped fire-belching turtles have to do with shooting stars?’” Everyone laughed again.

  “This is straight from the later writings of Saunt Evenedric,” Arsibalt said.

  Everyone got quiet. We’d thought we were just being playful, until now. “Fraa Arsibalt is jumping ahead,” Orolo said, in a tone of mild protest.

  “Evenedric was a theor,” Jesry pointed out. “This isn’t the kind of stuff he would have written about.”

  “On the contrary,” Arsibalt said, squaring off, “later in his life, after the Reconstitution, he—”

  “If you don’t mind,” Orolo said.

  “Of course not,” said Arsibalt.

  “Restricting ourselves to nerve-gas-farting dragons, how many colors do you think we could distinguish?”

  Opinions varied between eight and a hundred. Tulia thought she could distinguish more, Lio fewer.

  “Say ten,” Orolo said. “Now, let us allow for striped dragons with alternating colors.”

  “Then there would be a hundred combinations,” I said.

  “Ninety,” Jesry corrected me. “You can’t count red/red and so on.”

  “Allowing for different stripe widths, could we get it up to a thousand distinguishable combinations?” Orolo asked. There was general agreement that we could. “Now move on to spots. Plaids. Combinations of spots, plaids, and stripes.”

  “Hundreds of thousands! Millions!” different people were guessi
ng.

  “And we are only considering nerve-gas-farting dragons, so far!” Orolo reminded us. “What of lizards, turtles, gods—”

  “Hey!” Jesry exclaimed, and shot a glance at Arsibalt. “This is becoming the kind of argument that a theor would make.”

  “How so, Fraa Jesry? Where is the theorical content?”

  “In the numbers,” Jesry said, “in the profusion of different scenarios.”

  “Please explain.”

  “Once you have opened the door to these hypotheticals that don’t have to make internal sense, you quickly find yourself looking at a range of possibilities that might as well be infinitely numerous,” Jesry said. “So the mind rejects them as being equally invalid, and doesn’t worry about them.”

  “And this is true of slines as well as of Saunt Evenedric?” Arsibalt asked.

  “It has to be,” Jesry said.

  “So it is an intrinsic feature of human consciousness—this filtering ability.”

  As Arsibalt grew more confident, Jesry—sensing he was being drawn into a trap—became more cautious. “Filtering ability?” he asked.

  “Don’t play stupid, Jesry!” called Suur Ala, who was also reporting for kitchen duty. “You just said yourself that the mind rejects and doesn’t worry about the overwhelming majority of hypothetical scenarios. If that’s not a ‘filtering ability’ I don’t know what is!”

  “Sorry!” Jesry snapped back, and looked around at me, Lio, and Arsibalt, as if he’d just been mugged, and needed witnesses.

  “What then is the criterion that the mind uses to select an infinitesimal minority of possible outcomes to worry about?” Orolo asked.

  “Plausibility.” “Possibility,” people were murmuring, but no one seemed to feel confident enough to stake a claim.

  “Earlier, Fraa Erasmas mentioned that it had something to do with being able to tell a coherent story.”

  “It is a Hemn space—a configuration space—argument,” I blurted, before I’d even thought about it. “That’s the connection to Evenedric the theor.”