Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  I towed Laro and Brajj towed the toboggan. We tied ourselves together with the length of good rope that had formerly connected me to Laro, and set out in the same style as before, with Brajj going first and using his tent pole to probe for crevasses.

  I tried not to think about the possibility that Dag might still be alive in the bottom of the crevasse.

  Then I tried not to wonder how many other migrants’ corpses would be found strewn all over this territory if all the ice and snow ever melted.

  Then I tried not to wonder if Orolo’s might be among them.

  For now I’d just have to settle for making sure I wasn’t among them. I paid close attention to Brajj’s footprints. If Brajj went into another crevasse, I might try to save him—which was why he’d kept me alive. But if I went in, Laro and I were both dead. So I stepped where he stepped.

  After a few hours I lost track of what was happening. Everything I had was channeled into keeping my feet moving. There’s not much point in trying to offer a description of the bleakness, the moral and physical misery. In those rare moments when I was lucid enough to think, I reminded myself that avout had been through far worse ordeals in the Third Sack and at other such times.

  Since I was so groggy, I have no way of guessing when Brajj parted company with us. Laro’s voice brought me to awareness. He was screaming and fighting with the sphere, trying to get out. I told Brajj we had to stop. Hearing no answer, I looked around and discovered that he was gone. The rope that had connected us had fallen victim to his sticker. And no wonder: we were on the floor of a valley that led straight to the port, a couple of miles away, and the ground was black and burnished smooth by all of the tires and treads that had passed over it. We were on the path of the military convoy. No worries about crevasses here. So Brajj had taken off. I never saw him again.

  Laro was frantic to get out. Perhaps he’d been that way for a long time. I was worried he’d hurt himself flailing around. I inflated the sphere until he couldn’t move at all, and then I knelt beside him and looked into his eyes and tried to talk some sense into him. This was monumentally difficult. I’d known some, such as Tulia, who could do it effortlessly—or at least she made it look that way. Yul simply would have bellowed into his face, used the force of his personality. But it was not a thing that came easily to me.

  He wanted to know where Dag was. I told him Dag was dead, which did nothing to calm him down—but I couldn’t lie to him and I was too exhausted to devise a better plan.

  The sound of engines cut through the still, frigid air. It came from up-valley. A small convoy of military fetches was headed our way—detached from the huge procession to go back and run some errand at the port.

  By the time they approached within hailing distance, Laro had got a grip on himself, if hopeless, uncontrollable sobbing could be so described. I relaxed the sphere, undid the chord, and dragged him free of the bundle, then got everything stowed back in my pockets.

  Those guys in the military trucks were real pros. They came right over and picked us up. They took us into town. They didn’t ask questions, at least none that I remember. Though I was not exactly in a mirthful frame of mind, I marked this down as being funny. With my simpleminded view of the Saecular world, I’d assumed that the soldiers, simply because they looked sort of like cops with their uniforms and weapons, would act like cops, and arrest us. But it turned out that they couldn’t have cared less about law enforcement, which made perfect sense once I thought about it for ten seconds. They took Laro to a charity clinic run by the local Kelx—a religion that was strong in these parts. Then they dropped me off at the edge of the water. I bought some decent food at a tavern and slept face-down on the table until I was ejected. Standing out there on the street I felt stretched thin, diluted, as if that pale arctic sunlight could shine right through me and give my heart a sunburn. But I could still walk and I had money—the sledge driver had never collected the second half of his fare. I bought passage to Mahsht on the next outbound transport, boarded it as soon as they’d let me, climbed into a bunk, and slept one more time in that horrible suitsack.

  * * *

  Kelx: (1) A religious faith created during the Sixteenth or Seventeenth Century A.R. The name is a contraction of the Orth Ganakelux meaning “Triangle Place,” so called because of the symbolic importance of triangles in the faith’s iconography. (2) An ark of the Kelx faith. Kedev: A devotee of the Kelx or Triangle faith.

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

  About halfway into the four-day cruise I had recovered to the point where I was capable of introspection. I spent a lot of time sitting very still in the ship’s mess, eating. I had to sit still because I’d messed up my ribs and back in the fall, and it hurt to move—even to breathe. The food was good compared to energy bars. Perhaps I ate so much of it in hopes that it would bring up the level of Allswell in my blood and chase the dark thoughts from my head.

  Getting me killed couldn’t have been part of Fraa Jad’s plan. Where then had it gone wrong? My foolish choices? The migrant traffic over the pole had been going on at least long enough for Jad to have heard about it—he’d known that a Feral like Orolo would take that route to Ecba. So it was an ancient and settled practice. We’d all underestimated its dangers precisely because it was so ancient. We’d assumed that nothing could go on for so long unless it was safe—the way avout would run things if we were in charge.

  But we weren’t in charge and it wasn’t run that way.

  Or maybe it was a safe and settled thing most of the time but the military convoy had thrown it into chaos.

  Or maybe we’d just been unlucky.

  “You look like you’ve been through a harrowing experience.”

  I snapped out of it, and looked up by rotating my eyeballs—not my head, as I had a terrible crick in the neck. A man was standing there looking at me. Probably in his third decade. I’d noticed him eyeing me the day before. Now he’d come over and said this to me as a way of striking up a conversation.

  I’m sorry to say I broke out laughing. It took me a minute to get it under control.

  Harrowing was a thing that we did—literally—to our tangles during the spring. We went through the beds on hands and knees identifying the weeds and rooting them out with hand-hoes, throwing the weeds on a pile to be burned, leaving nothing except churned-up soil, pulverizing the clods in our hands to leave a loose bed for expansion of the tangle plants’ root systems. So when this stranger suggested I’d been through a harrowing experience, my mind went straight to that and I thought he was trying to say that I looked as if I’d been crawling through dirt. Which I did. Or perhaps that I looked like a heap of dead weeds. Which I also did. Finally I remembered that I was extramuros, where the old literal meaning of harrowing had been forgotten thousands of years ago, and it had become a cliché, uprooted from any concrete meaning.

  None of this could be explained to the stranger, so all I could do was sit there and helplessly giggle—which made my ribs hurt—and hope he wouldn’t take umbrage and slug me. But he was patient. He even looked a little pained to behold someone in such a pathetic state. Which was fortunate since he was a big man and could have slugged me hard.

  This gave me an idea that stopped the giggle. “Hey,” I said, “do you have any spare clothes? I’d buy them from you.”

  “You do need clean clothes,” the stranger said. This brought me back to giggling. From time to time I’d get a whiff of myself. I knew it was bad. But I couldn’t very well don my bolt.

  “I have more clothes than I need and will gladly part with them,” he said.

  He had an odd way of talking. Quasi-literate Saeculars went to stores and bought prefabricated letters, machine-printed on heavy stock with nice pictures, and sent them to each other as emotional gestures. They were written in a stilted language that no one ever spoke aloud—except for this guy who was standing in front of me letting fly with words like harrowing.

  He went on, “I don’t ask for an
ything in return. But I do hope you’ll join me for services—after you’ve changed.”

  So that was it. This guy wanted to convert me to his ark. He’d been watching me and had picked me out as a wretch—a soul ripe for saving.

  I had nothing better to do, and it had become all too obvious that I needed to grow a little wiser in the ways of the Saecular world. So I threw away my stinking clothes and my suitsack, bathed as best as I could while standing in front of a sink, and put on this guy’s funny-smelling clothes. Then I went to a hot crowded cabin where his ark was holding its services. There were a dozen and a half devotees and one magister—a leathery man named Sark who apparently spent his life banging around on ships like this, ministering to sailors and fishermen.

  This was a Kelx—a Triangle ark. Its adherents were called Kedevs. It was a completely different faith from that of Ganelial Crade. It had been invented about two thousand years ago by some ingenious prophet who must have been unusually self-effacing, since little was known about him and he wasn’t worshipped as such. Like most faiths it was as fissured and fractured as the glaciers I’d been walking over lately. But all of its sects and schisms agreed that there was another world outside of and greater—in a sense, more real—than the one we lived in. That in this world there was a robber who had waylaid a family. He’d slain the father outright, raped and killed the mother, and taken their daughter with him as a hostage. Not long after, while trying to evade capture, he’d strangled the innocent girl. But he’d been caught anyway and locked up in a dungeon for a long time (“half of his life”) while waiting for his case to come before a Magistrate. At the trial he had admitted his guilt. The Magistrate had asked if there was any reason why he should not be put to death. The Condemned Man had responded that there was such a reason, one that had come to him during his years in the dungeon. As he had meditated over his hideous crimes, the one thing he’d never been able to chase from his mind was the murder of the girl—the Innocent—because in her there had been the potential to do so many things that could now never be realized. In any soul, the Condemned Man argued, was the ability to create a whole world, as big and variegated as the one that he and the Magistrate lived in. But if this was true of the Innocent, it was true of the Condemned Man as well, and so he should not—no one should ever—be put to death.

  The Magistrate upon hearing this had voiced skepticism that the Condemned Man really had it in him to generate a whole world. Taking up the challenge, the Condemned Man had begun to tell the tale of a world he had thought up in his mind and to relate the stories of its gods, heroes, and kings. This had taken up the whole day, so the Magistrate had adjourned the court. But he had warned the Condemned Man that his fate was still in the balance because the world he had invented seemed to be just as full of wars, crimes, and cruelty as the one that they lived in. The Condemned Man’s stay of execution was only as good as the world he had invented. If the various troubles in that world could not be brought to a satisfactory conclusion in tomorrow’s session, he would be executed at sundown.

  The next day the Condemned Man had attempted to satisfy the Magistrate, and made a little headway, but in so doing introduced new troubles and gave birth to new characters no less morally ambiguous than the first lot. The Magistrate could not find sufficient grounds to execute him and so had continued the case to the next day, and the next, and the next.

  The world that I lived in with Jesry and Lio and Arsibalt, Orolo and Jad, Ala and Tulia and Cord and all the others, was the very world that was being created from day to day in the mind of the Condemned Man in that courtroom. Sooner or later it would all end in a final judgment by the Magistrate. If that—if our—world seemed, on balance, like a decent place to him, he would let the Condemned Man live and our world would go on existing in his mind. If the world, as a whole, only reflected the Condemned Man’s depravity, the Magistrate would have him executed and our world would cease to exist. We could help keep the Condemned Man alive and thus preserve the existence of ourselves and our world by striving at all times to make it a better place.

  That’s why Alwash—the big stranger—had given me his clothes. He was trying to prevent the end of the world.

  Kelx was a contraction of the Orth words meaning “Triangle Place.” Triangles figured in the faith’s iconography. In the story just told there were three key characters: the Condemned Man, the Magistrate, and the Innocent. The Condemned Man represented a creative but flawed principle. The Magistrate represented judgment and goodness. The Innocent was inspiration that had the power to redeem the Condemned Man. Taken individually these each lacked something but taken as a triad they had created us and our world. Debates as to the nature of this triad had triggered a hundred wars, but in any case they all believed in one interpretation or other of the basic story. At this point in history the Kelx was very much under the heel of other faiths and had become especially bitter and apocalyptic. The premise of the whole faith was that sooner or later the Magistrate would make up his mind, and so the magisters—as their clergy were called—could get their flocks emotionally whipped up, as needed, by claiming that the judgment was near at hand.

  Today’s sermon was one of those. Kelxes didn’t have long complicated services like the Bazians. The service consisted of a harangue from Magister Sark, followed by interviews with the Kedevs, concluded by another harangue. He wanted to know what each man in the cabin (we were all men) had done lately to make the world a better place. We might all be flawed—as how could we not since we originated in the mind of a rapist and murderer—and yet because of the pure inspiration that had impregnated the Condemned Man’s soul from the Innocent at the moment of her death, we had the power to make the world better in a way that would please the all-seeing and-knowing Magistrate.

  Crazy as this all was I found it sort of compelling in my weakened state, and tried the experiment of playing along with it for a while. This might sound very unlike an avout, but we were used to being presented with outlandish cosmographical hypotheses, and in our theorics we did this sort of thing all the time: that is, assume for the sake of argument that a hypothesis was true, and see where it led.

  I’d known the tale of the Condemned Man for almost as long as I’d been alive, but sitting in this cabin I learned two things about the faith—or at least this sect—that I hadn’t known before. One, that the events of our world, which happened in parallel (each person doing something different at the same time), were teased apart and narrated serially by the Condemned Man to the Magistrate. There was no way to tell the stories of billions concurrently, so he broke them down into smaller, more manageable narratives and told them consecutively. So, for example, my trip down the glacier with Brajj and Laro and Dag had been related to the Magistrate as one self-contained tale, after which the Condemned Man had doubled back in time to tell the story of what, say, Ala had done that day. Or, if Ala hadn’t done anything unusual—if she hadn’t been presented, say, with any great choices—the Condemned Man might have said nothing of her and she might thus have avoided the Magistrate’s scrutiny for the time being.

  The full attention of the Magistrate was focused on only one such story at a time. When your story was being told, you were under the pitiless inspection of the Magistrate, who saw everything you did and knew everything you thought—so at such times it was important to make the correct choices! If you attended Kelx services often enough, you’d develop a sixth sense for when your story was being told to the Magistrate and you’d get better at making the right choices.

  Second, the Inspiration that had passed from the Innocent to the Condemned Man at the moment of her death was viral. It passed from him into each of us. Each of us had the same power to create whole worlds. The hope was that one day there would be a Chosen One who would create a world that was perfect. If that ever happened, not only he and his world but all of the other worlds and their creators, back to the Condemned Man, would be saved recursively.

  When Sark turned his hot gaze upon me a
nd asked me what I had done of late to save the world, I, in a spirit of trying to play along, began to tell an edited version of the story of the descent of the glacier. I left out any mention of bolt, chord, and sphere. And I intended to leave out the story of Dag’s death—or his being left for dead. But as I went on I found myself unable to tell the story without including that part of it. It just fell out of me, like an intestine that keeps uncoiling from the belly of a wounded animal. The whole thing had gone out of control. I’d intended to play along as a sort of intellectual parlor game but my emotions had taken over and dictated what I would say. Something about the whole setup of this ark, I realized (too late) was designed to play on such emotions. I wasn’t the first stranger to walk into one of these meetings and spill his guts. They expected it. They counted on it. It was why the Kelx had lasted two thousand years.

  When I’d finished, I looked over at Alwash, expecting to see a triumphant look on his face. Yeah, he’d gotten me but good. But he didn’t look that way at all. Just serious, and a little sad. Like he’d known what would happen. He’d done it before. He’d had it done to him.

  The silence that followed was long, but did not feel awkward. Then Magister Sark told me that it wasn’t clear I had done anything wrong at all given the circumstances. I understood this to mean that when the Magistrate had heard the story of Brajj, “Vit,” Laro, and Dag from the Condemned Man, he had not construed it to mean that the latter should be executed. At worst it was neutral testimony. I felt hugely relieved at this, and in the next moment hated myself for being emotionally manipulated by a witch doctor.