Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  “Well, that’s fine, if snakes and rocks is all you have to talk about.”

  “The world in this thought experiment,” Arsibalt said, “is a vast, irregular cavern sprinkled with traps: some freshly laid and still dangerous, others that have already been sprung and may safely be ignored.”

  “You went out of your way to say that they were mechanical contraptions. Are you saying they’re predictable?”

  “You or I could inspect one and figure out how it worked.”

  “Well, in that case it comes down to saying ‘this gear here engages with that gear, which rotates yonder shaft, which is connected to a spring,’ and so on.”

  Arsibalt nodded. “Yes. That’s the sort of thing the flies, bats, and worms would have to communicate to one another, in order to figure out what was a trap and what wasn’t.”

  “All right. So, same way that monkeys in trees settled on words for ‘rock’ and ‘snake,’ they’d develop symbols—words—meaning ‘shaft,’ ‘gear,’ and so on.”

  “Would that be enough?” Arsibalt asked.

  “Not for a complicated piece of clockwork. Let’s see, you could have two gears that were close to each other, but they couldn’t engage each other unless they were close enough for their teeth to mesh.”

  “Proximity. Distance. Measurement. How would the worm measure the distance between two shafts?”

  “By stretching from one to the other.”

  “What if they were too far apart?”

  “By crawling from one to the other, and keeping track of the distance it moved.”

  “The bat?”

  “Timing the difference in echoes between the two shafts.”

  “The fly?”

  “For the fly it’s easy: compare the images coming into its eyes.”

  “Very well, let’s say that the worm, the bat, and the fly have each observed the distance between the two shafts, just as you said. How do they compare notes?”

  “The worm for example would tell what it knew by translating it into the squirming-alphabet you mentioned.”

  “And what does a fly say to another fly upon seeing all of this?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It says ‘the worm seems to be relating some kind of account of its wormy doings, but since I don’t squirm on the ground and can’t imagine what it would be like to be blind, I haven’t the faintest idea what it’s trying to tell me!’”

  “Well, this is just what I was saying earlier,” Beller complained, “they have to have a language—not just an alphabet.”

  Arsibalt asked, “What is the only sort of language that could possibly serve?”

  Beller thought for a minute.

  “What are they trying to convey to each other?” Arsibalt prompted him.

  “Three-dimensional geometry,” Beller said. “And, since parts of the clock are moving, you’d also need time.”

  “Everything that a worm could possibly say to a fly, or a fly to a bat, or a bat to a worm, would be gibberish,” Arsibalt said, leading Beller forward.

  “Kind of like saying ‘blue’ to a blind man.”

  “‘Blue’ to a blind man, except for descriptions of geometry and of time. That is the only language that these creatures could ever possibly share.”

  “This makes me think of that geometry proof on the Cousins’ ship,” Beller said. “Are you saying that we are like the worms, and the Cousins are like the bats? That geometry is the only way we can speak to each other?”

  “Oh no,” Arsibalt said. “That’s not where I was going at all.”

  “Where are you going then?” Beller asked.

  “You know how multicellular life evolved?”

  “Er, single-celled organisms clumping together for mutual advantage?”

  “Yes. And, in some cases, encapsulating one another.”

  “I’ve heard of the concept.”

  “That is what our brains are.”

  “What!?”

  “Our brains are flies, bats, and worms that clumped together for mutual advantage. These parts of our brains are talking to each other all the time. Translating what they perceive, moment to moment, into the shared language of geometry. That’s what a brain is. That’s what it is to be conscious.”

  Beller spent a few seconds mastering the urge to run away screaming, then a few minutes pondering this. Arsibalt watched him closely the whole time.

  “You don’t mean literally that our brains evolved that way!” Beller protested

  “Of course not.”

  “Oh. That’s a relief.”

  “But I put it to you, Ferman, that our brains are functionally indistinguishable from ones that evolved thus.”

  “Because our brains have to be doing that kind of processing all the time, just—”

  “Just in order for us to be conscious. To integrate our sensory perceptions into a coherent model of ourselves and our surroundings.”

  “Is this that Sconic stuff you were talking about earlier?”

  Arsibalt nodded. “To a first approximation, yes. It is post-Sconic. Certain metatheoricians who had been strongly influenced by the Sconics came up with arguments like this one later, around the time of the First Harbinger.” Which was a bit more detail than Ferman Beller really wanted to hear. But Arsibalt’s eyes flicked in my direction, as if to confirm what I’d been suspecting: he had been reading up on this kind of thing as part of his research into the work that Evenedric had pursued later in his life. I lingered on the edge of that dialog until it started to wind down. Then I got up and headed straight for my bunk, planning to sleep good and hard. But Arsibalt, moving uncharacteristically fast, chased me out of the dining hall and ran me down.

  “What’s on your mind?” I asked him.

  “Some of the Hundreders held a little calca just before dinner.”

  “I noticed.”

  “They couldn’t get the numbers to add up.”

  “Which numbers?”

  “That ship simply isn’t big enough to travel between star systems in a reasonable amount of time. It can’t possibly hold a sufficient number of atomic bombs to accelerate its own mass to relativistic velocity.”

  “Well,” I said, “maybe it split off from a mother ship that we haven’t seen yet, and that is that big.”

  “It doesn’t look like it’s that kind of vessel,” Arsibalt said. “It is huge, with space to support tens of thousands of people indefinitely.”

  “Too big to be a shuttle—too small for interstellar cruising,” I said.

  “Precisely.”

  “Seems like you are making a lot of assumptions though.”

  “That is a fair criticism,” he said with a shrug. But I could tell he had some other hypothesis.

  “Okay. What do you think?” I asked him.

  “I think it is from another cosmos,” he said, “and that is why they Evoked Paphlagon.”

  We were at the door of my cabin.

  “This cosmos we’re living in has me flummoxed,” I said. “I don’t know whether I can start thinking about additional ones at this point in the day.”

  “Good night then, Fraa Erasmas.”

  “Good night, Fraa Arsibalt.”

  I woke to the sound of bells. I couldn’t make sense of them. Then I remembered where I was and understood that they were not our bells, but those of the monks, rousing them for some punishingly early ritual.

  My mind was about half sorted out. Many of the new ideas, events, people, and images that had come at me from every direction the day before had been squared away, like so many leaves rolled up and thrust into pigeonholes. Not that anything had really been settled. All of the questions that had been open when my head had hit the pillow were still pending. But in the intervening hours, my brain had been changing to fit the new shape of my world. I guess that’s why we can’t do anything else when we’re sleeping: it’s when we work hardest.

  The peals faded slowly, until I couldn’t tell whether I was hearing the bells themselves
, or ringing in my ears. Enduring was a deep tone, solid, steady, but faint because distant. I knew somehow that I’d been hearing it for hours—that in those moments of semi-waking when I’d rolled over or pulled up the covers I’d marked this sound and wondered what it was before falling back to sleep. An obvious guess would be some nocturnal bird. But the tone was low, for an avian throat: like someone playing a ten-foot-long flute half-choked with rocks and water. And birds tended not to just sit in one place and make noise for half the night. Some kind of big amphibian, then, crazy for a mate, squatting on a rock by the spring and blowing wind through a quivering air-sac. But the sound was regular. Patterned. Perhaps the hum from a generator. An irrigation pump down in the valley. Trucks descending a grade using air brakes.

  Curiosity and a full bladder were keeping me awake. Finally I got up, moving quietly so as not to disturb Lio, and tugged at my blanket. Out of habit, I was going to wrap it around myself. Then I hesitated, remembering that I was supposed to wear extramuros clothes. In the predawn gloom I couldn’t even see the pile of trousers and underwear and whatnot I’d left on the floor last night. So I went back to plan A, peeled the blanket off the bed, wrapped it around myself, and went out.

  The sound seemed to come from everywhere at once, but by the time I’d used the latrine and emerged into the cool morning air, I’d started to get an idea of where it came from: a stone retaining wall that the monks had built along a steep part of the mountain to prevent their road from crumbling into the valley. As I walked toward it my perceptions cleared suddenly and I shook my head in amazement at my own silliness in having imagined it was an amphibian or a truck. It was plainly a human voice. Singing. Or rather droning, for he had been stuck on the same note the whole time I’d been awake.

  The note changed slightly. Okay, so it wasn’t a drone. It was a chant. A very, very slow one.

  Not wanting to stroll right up to Fraa Jad and disturb him, I maneuvered around on the soft wet grass of the retreat center’s archery range until I was able to bring him in view at a distance of a couple of hundred feet. The retaining wall ran in straight segments joined by round, flat-topped towers about four feet in diameter. Fraa Jad had rescued his bolt from his luggage, plumped it up to winter thickness, and put it on, then climbed to the top of a pillar that had a fine view to the south across the desert. He was sitting there with his legs tucked under him and his arms outstretched. Off to the left, the sky was luminescent purplish, washed of stars. To the right, a few bright stars and a planet still shone, striving against the light of the coming day, succumbing one by one as the minutes went by.

  I could have stood there watching and listening for hours. I got the idea—which might have been just my imagination—that Fraa Jad was singing a cosmographical chant: a requiem for the stars that were being swallowed up in the dawn. Certainly it was music of cosmographical slowness. Some of the notes went on for longer than I could hold my breath. He must have some trick of breathing and singing at the same time.

  A single bell rang behind and above me at the monastery. A priest’s voice sang an invocation in Old Orth. A choir answered him. It was a call to the dawn aut, or something. I was crestfallen that their rituals were trampling on Fraa Jad’s chant. But I had to admit that if Cord had been awake to see this, she’d have been hard put to see any difference between the two. Whatever Fraa Jad was chanting was rooted, I knew, in thousands of years’ theorical research wedded to a musical tradition as old and as deep. But why put theorics into music at all? And why stay up all night sitting in a beautiful place chanting that music? There were easier ways to add two plus two.

  I’d been singing bass since the eventful season, six years ago, when I’d fallen down the stairs from soprano. Where I lived, that meant lots of droning. When you spend three hours singing the same note, something happens to your brain. And that goes double when you have fallen into oscillatory lockstep with the others around you, and when you collectively have gotten your vocal chords tuned into the natural harmonics of the Mynster (to say nothing of the thousands of casks stacked against its walls). In all seriousness I believe that the physical vibration of your brain by sound waves creates changes in how the brain works. And if I were a craggy old Thousander—not a nineteen-year-old Tenner—I might just have the confidence to assert that when your brain is in that state it can think things it could never think otherwise. Which is a way of saying that I didn’t think Fraa Jad had been up all night chanting just because he was a music lover. He was doing something.

  I left Fraa Jad alone and went for a stroll while the sun came up. Clatters and hisses from the dining hall told me that the retreat center staff were up making breakfast, so I went to the cell and put on my extra costume, then went there to lend a hand. In some respects I might be helpless extramuros, but I knew how to cook. Fraa Jad and the rest of our group drifted in, one by one, and tried to help until they were ejected and commanded to eat.

  In addition to the four who’d dined with us the night before, three more monks joined us for breakfast, including one very old one who wanted to talk to Fraa Jad, though he was quite hard of hearing. The rest of the avout left them alone. These monks seemed to consider it a high honor to talk to a Thousander and so why should we interfere? They weren’t going to get another chance.

  At the end of the meal they presented us with some books. I let Arsibalt accept them and make a nice speech. They liked what he said so much that it made me squirm a little, because it seemed he was encouraging them to see all sorts of natural connections between who we were and who they were. But no harm came of it. These people had been good to us, and they’d done it with open hearts, and no expectation of anything in return—I was pretty sure the Saecular Power wasn’t going to reimburse them! That’s why Arsibalt’s talk made me uneasy—he seemed to hold out the possibility that they would get something in return, namely, future contact between them and us. I stepped on his toe. He seemed to take my meaning. A few minutes later, we were on our way down the mountain, the monks’ books having been added to Arsibalt’s portable library.

  * * *

  Erasmas: A fraa at Saunt Baritoe’s in the Fourteenth Century A.R. who, along with Suur Uthentine, founded the branch of metatheorics called Complex Protism.

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

  Between the monastery and Bly’s Butte, a very small river trickled through a very large canyon, spanned by only one bridge that was fit for use. Until we had crossed this, and come to a fork, we didn’t need to think very hard about which direction we ought to go. The road to the left swung wide to avoid the mountain. The one to the right headed up the bank of a tributary toward a settlement marked on the cartabla as Samble. So we went that way, and, a little more than an hour after leaving the monastery, found ourselves approaching something that, from a distance, looked like a pot scourer dropped on the smooth southern flank of Bly’s Butte. It was a carpet of scrubby trees. As we got closer we saw it had been cleaved and sorted by settlers’ walls, rooves, and fences. Taller trees, obviously fawned over by generations who loved them for shade or beauty, stood in a rectangle around a plot of grass, at one end of which rose the acute wood-framed sky-altar of a counter-Bazian ark. Without any communication between the two vehicles, we found our way to that village green. When we climbed out, we heard singing from the ark. But we saw no people. The entire town—including Ganelial Crade, whose fetch was parked in a patch of dirt behind the ark—was inside that building.

  This didn’t seem like a good place to look for Orolo or (assuming he was still alive) Estemard. But it did give us our first hint as to how a couple of Ferals might have been able to survive out here: by coming down into Samble to get things like food and medicine. How they might have paid for them was another question. But Fraa Carmolathu pointed out that Samble didn’t make much economic sense to begin with. There weren’t any other towns hereabouts, the land didn’t support farming, there was little in the way of industry. He developed a theory that it was
every bit as much a religious community as the monastery where we’d stayed last night. And if that were the case, perhaps Estemard and Orolo didn’t have to pay for things with money, if instead they could provide useful services to the townsfolk.

  “Or perhaps they are simply beggars,” suggested Fraa Jad, “like certain Orders of old.”

  Most of the avout seemed more comfortable with the beggar hypothesis than with any suggestion that Estemard or Orolo might have been making himself useful to these kinds of people. It led to a lively discussion. All of our attempts to plane each other would have disturbed the service in the ark if it had been a quiet and contemplative kind of proceeding, but it was more raucous in that place than we could ever hope to be, with a lot of singing that sounded like shouting. A few of us separated ourselves from the discussion and spent a minute looking back and forth between the cartabla and the butte. Samble—which Fraa Carmolathu speculated might be an ancient weathered contraction of “Savant Bly”—stood at the beginning of a dirt road that spiraled around the butte to its top. After a few minutes we identified the place where that road began: the dirt lot behind the ark. And at the moment there was no way to drive through it and get on that road. The lot was full of parked vehicles: a few shiny mobes such as might belong to whoever passed for Burgers in Samble, but mostly dust-covered fetches with big tires. There was an open lane up the center. The head of the road, though, was squarely blocked by Ganelial Crade’s fetch.

  According to the cartabla, it was only four miles to the top, and I was feeling restless, so I filled my water bottle from a pump in the middle of the green and started to walk up the road. Lio came with me. So did Fraa Criscan, who was the youngest of the Hundreders. It felt a little strange walking among the parked fetches of the faithful of Samble, but once we squeezed past Crade’s and got onto the road, it curved around the flank of the butte, and the little town disappeared from view. A minute after that, we were no longer able to hear the shouting inside the ark, just the rush of a dry crackling wind coming at us from across the desert, carrying the sharp perfume of the tough resinous plants that grew down there. We gained altitude briskly and the temperature of the air dropped even as we warmed to the task. Once we had reached a point opposite to Samble, we were able to see all the way up to the top and make out a few buildings and the crippled skeletons of old aerial towers and polyhedral domes. We guessed they were military relics, which wasn’t interesting, since, after a few thousand years of habitation, all landscapes were strewn with such things.