Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  I was only agreeing with the consensus. Most of the others nodded. But Arsibalt of all people seemed to take what I’d said as a challenge. He cleared his throat and came back at me as if we were in dialog. “Fraa Erasmas, what you have said makes sense as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go very far. Since Anathem was rung down on Orolo, it’s easy for us to fall in the habit of thinking of him as a malcontent. But would you have identified him as such before Apert?”

  “Your point is well taken, Fraa Arsibalt. Let’s not waste time taking a poll of everyone standing around this fire. Orolo was as happy to abide under the Discipline as any avout who ever lived.”

  “But the launching of a new reconaissance satellite is clearly a Saecular event, is it not?”

  “Yes.”

  “And, moreover, since that kind of praxis has been around for millenia—long enough that Fraa Lio here can read of it in ancient books—there is nothing new that Orolo could have learned by making observations of such a satellite, is there?”

  “Presumably not—unless it embodied some newly developed praxis.”

  “But such a new praxis would also be a Saecular event, would it not?” Tulia put in.

  “Yes, Suur Tulia. And therefore no concern of the avout.”

  “So,” said Arsibalt, “if we accept the premise that Fraa Orolo was a true avout who respected the Discipline, we cannot at the same time believe that the thing he saw in the sky was a satellite recently launched from the surface of Arbre.”

  “Because,” said Lio, completing the thought, “he’d have identified any such thing as being of no interest to us.”

  All of which made sense; but it left us with nowhere to go. Or at least, nowhere we were willing to go.

  Except for Barb. “Therefore it must be an alien ship.”

  Jesry inhaled deeply and let out a big sigh. “Fraa Tavener,” he said, using Barb’s avout name, “remind me to show you some research, back in the Library, showing just how unlikely that is.”

  “Unlikely but not impossible?” Fraa Tavener shot back. Jesry sighed again.

  “Fraa Jesry,” I said, and managed to catch his eye and throw him a wry look—exactly the kind of signal to which Barb was oblivious. “Fraa Tavener seems very keen on the topic. The fire’s dying fast. We only have a few more minutes here. Why don’t you go on ahead of us and show him that research. We’ll put out the fire and tidy up.”

  Everyone was quiet for a while, because every one of us—including I—was startled by what had just happened: I had bossed Jesry around. Unprecedented! But I didn’t care. I was too busy caring about other things.

  “Right,” Jesry said, and stomped off into the dark with Barb in tow. The rest of us stood there silently until the sound of Barb’s questions had been drowned out by the seething of the fire and the burble of the river over ice-shoals.

  “You want to talk about the tablet,” Lio predicted.

  “It’s time to bring that thing down and look at it,” I said.

  “I’m surprised you haven’t been in more of a hurry,” Tulia said. “I’ve been dying to see that thing.”

  “Remember what happened to Orolo,” I said. “He was incautious. Or maybe he just didn’t care whether he got caught.”

  “Do you care?” Tulia asked. It was a blunt question that made the others uneasy. But no one edged away. They all looked at me, keen to hear my answer. The grief that had hit me at the moment Statho had called Orolo’s name was still with me all the time, but I had learned that it could transform in a flash to anger. Not jumping-up-and-down anger but cold implacable fury that settled in my viscera and made me think some most unpleasant thoughts. It was distorting my face; I knew this because younger fids who had used to give me a pleasant greeting when I encountered them in a gallery or on the meadow now averted their eyes.

  “Frankly no,” I said. This was a lie, but it felt good. “I don’t care whether I get Thrown Back. But you guys are all involved in it too, and so I’m going to be careful for your sakes. Remember, this tablet might have no useful information whatsoever. Even if it does, we might have to stare into the thing for months or even years before we see anything. So we are talking about a lengthy and secret campaign.”

  “Well, it seems to me that we owe it to Orolo to try,” Tulia said.

  “I can bring it down whenever you like,” Lio said.

  “I know of a dark room beneath Shuf’s Dowment where we could view it,” Arsibalt said.

  “Very well,” I said. “I only need a little bit of help from you guys. I’ll do the rest myself. If I get caught, I’ll say you knew nothing and I’ll take responsibility for whatever happens. They’ll give me Chapter Six, or worse. And then I’ll walk out of here and try to find Orolo.”

  These words made Tulia and Lio quite emotional in different ways. She looked ready to weep and he looked ready to fight. But Arsibalt was merely impatient with me for being so slow. “There is a larger matter at stake than getting in trouble,” he said. “You are avout, Fraa Erasmas. You swore a vow to keep the Discipline. It’s the most solemn and important thing in your life. That is what you are putting into play. Whether or not you get caught and punished is a detail.”

  Arsibalt’s words had a strong effect on me because they were true. I had an answer ready-made, but it wasn’t one that I could speak aloud: I no longer respected that oath. Or at least, I no longer trusted those who were charged with enforcing the Discipline to which I had sworn. But I couldn’t very well say as much to these friends of mine who did still respect it. My mind worked for a while, looking for a way to answer Arsibalt’s challenge, and the others were content to stand there and poke at the dying fire and wait for me to speak.

  “I trust Orolo,” I finally said. “I trust that, in his mind, he was in no way violating the Discipline. That he was punished by lesser minds who don’t understand what is really going on. I think he is—that he will be—a—”

  “Say it!” Tulia snapped.

  “Saunt,” I said. “I will do this for Saunt Orolo.”

  Part 5

  Lineage: (1) (Extramuros) A line of hereditary descent. (2) (Intramuros) A chronological sequence of avout who acquired and held property exceeding the bolt, chord, and sphere, each conferring the property upon a chosen heir at the moment of death. The wealth (see Dowment) accumulated by some Lineages (or at least, rumors of it) fostered the Baud Iconography. Lineages were eliminated as part of the Third Sack reforms.

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

  Whatever you might say of his rich descendants, Fraa Shuf had had little wealth and no plan. That became obvious as soon as you descended the flagstone stairs into the cellar of the place that he had started and his heirs had finished. I write cellar, but it is more true to say that there was some number of cellars—I never made an exact count—cemented to one another in some graph that no one fully understood. It was a real accomplishment, in a way, to have left such a mess under a building so small. Arsibalt, of course, had an explanation: Shuf’s avocation was stone-mason. He had begun the project, circa 1200, as a sort of eccentric pastime. He’d meant only to build a narrow tower with a room at the top where one avout could sit and meditate. That done, he’d passed it on to a fid who had noticed the tower beginning to lean, and had spent much of his life replacing the foundation—a tetchy sort of undertaking that involved digging out cavities beneath what was already there and socking huge stone blocks into the holes. He’d ended up with more foundation than was really needed, and passed it on to another mason who had done more digging, more foundation work, and more wall-building. And so it had gone for some generations until the Lineage had begun to gather wealth beyond the building itself and had needed a place to store it. The old foundation-work had then been rediscovered, re-excavated, walled, floored, vaulted, and extended. For one of the toxic things about Lineages was that rich avout could get not-so-rich ones to do things for them in exchange for better food, better drink, and better lodging.

  An
yway, by the time that the Reformed Old Faanians had begun sneaking back to the ruin of Shuf’s Dowment, hundreds of years after the Third Sack, the earth had reclaimed much of the cellars. I wasn’t sure how the dirt got into those places and covered the floor so deep. Some process humans couldn’t fathom because it went on so gradually. The ROF, who had been so diligent about fixing up the above-ground part, had almost completely ignored the cellars. To your right as you reached the bottom of the stairs there was one chamber where they stored wine and some silver table-service that was hauled out for special occasions. Beyond that, the cellars were a wilderness.

  Arsibalt, contrary to his reputation, had become its intrepid explorer. His maps were ancient floor-plans that he found in the Library and his tools were a pickaxe and a shovel. The mystical object of his quest was a vaulted sub-basement that according to legend was where Shuf’s Lineage had stored its gold. If any such place had ever existed, it had been found and cleaned out during the Third Sack. But to rediscover it would be interesting. It would also be a boon for the ROF since, in recent years, avout of other orders had entertained themselves by circulating rumors to the effect that the ROF had found or were accumulating treasure down there. Arsibalt could put such rumors to rest by finding the sub-basement and then inviting people to go and see it for themselves.

  But there was no hurry—there never was, with him—and no one was expecting results before Arsibalt’s hair had turned white. From time to time he would come tromping back over the bridge covered with dirt and fill our bath with silt, and we would know he had gone on another expedition.

  So I was surprised when he took me down those stairs, turned left instead of right, led me through a few twists and turns that looked too narrow for him, and showed me a rusty plate in the floor of a dirty, wet-smelling room. He hauled it up to expose a cavity below, and an aluminum step-ladder that he had pilfered from somewhere else in the concent. “I was obliged to saw the legs off—a little,” he confessed, “as the ceiling is quite low. After you.”

  The legendary treasure-vault turned out to be approximately one arm-span wide and high. The floor was dirt. Arsibalt had spread out a poly tarp so that perishable things—“such as your bony arse, Raz”—could exist here without continually drawing up moisture from the earth. Oh, and there wasn’t any treasure. Just a lot of graffiti carved into the walls by disappointed slines.

  It was just about the nastiest place imaginable to work. But we had almost no choices. It wasn’t as if I could sit up on my pallet at night and throw my bolt over my head like a tent and stare at the forbidden tablet.

  We employed the oldest trick in the book—literally. In the Old Library, Tulia found a great big fat book that no one had pulled down from the shelf in eleven hundred years: a compendium of papers about a kind of elementary particle theorics that had been all the rage from 2300 to 2600, when Saunt Fenabrast had proved it was wrong. We cut a circle from each page until we had formed a cavity in the heart of this tome that was large enough to swallow the photomnemonic tablet. Lio carried it up to the Fendant court in a stack of other books and brought it back down at suppertime, much heavier, and handed it over to me. The next day I gave it to Arsibalt at breakfast. When I saw him at supper he told me that the tablet was now in place. “I looked at it, a little,” he said.

  “What did you learn?” I asked him.

  “That the Ita have been diligent about keeping Clesthyra’s Eye spotless,” he said. “One of them comes every day to dust it. Sometimes he eats his lunch up there.”

  “Nice place for it,” I said. “But I was thinking of night-time observations.”

  “I’ll leave those to you, Fraa Erasmas.”

  Now I only wanted an excuse to go to Shuf’s Dowment a lot. Here at last politics worked in my favor. Those who looked askance at the ROF’s fixing up the Dowment did so because it seemed like a sneaky way of getting something for nothing. If asked, the ROF would always insist that anyone was welcome to go there and work. But New Circles and especially Edharians rarely did so. Partly this was the usual inter-Order rivalry. Partly it was current events.

  “How have your brothers and sisters been treating you lately?” Tulia asked me one day as we were walking back from Provener. The shape of her voice was not warm-fuzzy. More curious-analytical. I turned around to walk backwards in front of her so that I could look at her face. She got annoyed and raised her eyebrows. She was coming of age in a month. After that, she could take part in liaisons without violating the Discipline. Things between us had become awkward.

  “Why do you ask? Just curious,” I said.

  “Stop making a spectacle of yourself and I’ll tell you.”

  I hadn’t realized I was making a spectacle of myself but I turned back around and fell in step beside her.

  “There is a new strain of thought,” Tulia said, “that Orolo was actually Thrown Back as retribution for the politicking that took place during the Eliger season.”

  “Whew!” was the most eloquent thing I could say about that. I walked on in silence for a while. It was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard. If you couldn’t be Thrown Back for stealing mead and selling it on the black market to buy forbidden consumer goods, then what wouldn’t bring down the Anathema? And yet—

  “Ideas like that are evil,” I said, “because some creepy-crawly part of your brain wants to believe in them even while your logical mind is blasting them to pieces.”

  “Well, some among the Edharians have been letting their creepy-crawly brains get the better of them,” Tulia said. “They don’t want to believe in the mead and the speelycaptor. Apparently, Orolo brokered a three-way deal that sent Arsibalt to the ROF in exchange for—”

  “Stop,” I said, “I don’t want to hear it.”

  “You know what Orolo did and so it’s easier for you to accept,” she said. “Others are having trouble with it—they want to make it into a political conspiracy and say that the thing with the mead never happened.”

  “Not even I am that cynical about Suur Trestanas,” I said. In the corner of my eye I saw Tulia turn her head to look at me.

  “Okay,” I admitted, “Let me put it differently. I don’t think she’s a conspiracist. I think she’s just plain evil.”

  That seemed to satisfy Tulia.

  “Look,” I said, “Fraa Orolo used to say that the concent was just like the outside world, except with fewer shiny objects. I had no idea what he was getting at. Now that he’s gone, I see it. Our knowledge doesn’t make us better or wiser. We can be just as nasty as those slines that beat up Lio and Arsibalt for the fun of it.”

  “Did Orolo have an answer?”

  “I think he did,” I said, “he was trying to explain it to me during Apert. Look for things that have beauty—it tells you that a ray is shining in from—well—”

  “A true place? The Hylaean Theoric World?” Again her face was hard to read. She wanted to know whether I believed in all that stuff. And I wanted to know if she did. I reckoned the stakes were higher for her. As an Edharian, I could get away with it. “Yeah,” I said. “I don’t know if he would have called it by that name. But it’s what he was driving at.”

  “Well,” she said, after giving it a few moments’ thought, “it’s better than spending your life swapping conspiracy theories.”

  That’s not saying much, I thought. But I didn’t say it out loud. The decision Tulia had made to join the New Circle was a real decision with real consequences. One of which was that she must be guarded when talking about ideas like the HTW that they considered to be superstitions. She could believe in that stuff if she wanted; but she had to keep it to herself, and it was bad form for me to try to pry it out of her.

  Anyway I now had an excuse to hang around at Shuf’s Dowment: I was trying to act as a peacemaker among the orders by accepting the ROF’s standing invitation.

  After breakfast each morning I would attend a lecture, typically with Barb, and work with him on proofs and problems until Provener and t
he midday meal. After that I would go out to the back part of the meadow where Lio and I were getting ready for the weed war, and work, or pretend to, for a while. I kept an eye on the bay window of Shuf’s Dowment, up on the hill on the other side of the river. Arsibalt kept a stack of books on the windowsill next to his big chair. If someone else was there, he would turn these so that their spines were toward the window. I could see their dark brown bindings from the meadow. But if he found himself alone, he would turn them so that their white page-edges were visible. When I noticed this I would stop work, go to a niche-gallery, fetch my theorics notes, and carry them over the bridge and through the page-tree-coppice to Shuf’s Dowment, as if I were going there to study. A few minutes later I’d be down in the sub-cellar, sitting crosslegged on that tarp and working with the tablet. When I was finished I would come back up through the cellars. Before ascending the flagstone steps I would look for another signal: if someone else was in the building, Arsibalt would close the door at the top of the stairs, but if he were alone, he’d leave it ajar.

  One of the many advantages that photomnemonic tablets held over ordinary phototypes was that they made their own light, so you could work with them in the dark. This tablet began and ended with daylight. If I ran it back to the very beginning, it became a featureless pool of white light with a faint bluish tinge: the unfocused light of sun and sky that had washed over the tablet after I had activated it on top of the Pinnacle during Fraa Paphlagon’s Voco. If I put the tablet into play mode I could then watch a brief funny-looking transition as it had been slid into Clesthyra’s Eye, and then, suddenly, an image, perfectly crisp and clear but geometrically distorted.

  Most of the disk was a picture of the sky. The sun was a neat white circle, off-center. Around the tablet’s rim was a dark, uneven fringe, like a moldy rind on a wheel of cheese: the horizon, all of it, in every direction. In this fisheye geometry, “down” for us humans—i.e., toward the ground—was always outward toward the rim of the tablet. Up was always inward toward the center. If several people had stood in a circle around Clesthyra’s eye, their waists would have appeared around the circumference of the image and their heads would have projected inward like spokes of a wheel.