Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  I’d lain awake in my cell all night from a combination of jet lag and fear of a Fourth Sack. Good thing that most of the day had been a huge Plenary at which the story of last night’s satellite gambit had been told, and phototypes and speelies exhibited. The back pews of the Unarian nave were dark, and roomy enough that I and scores of Lucub-weary avout had been able to stretch out full-length and catch up on sleep. When it was over, someone had shaken me awake. I had stood up, rubbed my eyes, looked across the Nave, and caught sight of Ala—the first time I’d seen her since she had stepped through the screen at Voco. She had been a hundred feet away, standing in a circle of taller avout, mostly men, all older, but seemingly holding her own in some kind of serious conversation. Some of the men had been Saeculars in military uniforms. I had decided that now was not the best time for me to bounce up to her and say hello.

  “Hey! Raz! Raz! How many fingers am I holding up?” Emman was demanding. Tris and Karvall thought that was funny. “How’s Lio doing?” he repeated.

  “Busy,” I said, “busy like all of us. He’s been working out quite a bit with the Ringing Vale avout.”

  Emman shook his head. “Nice that they’re getting exercise,” he said. “Love to know what joint locks and nerve pinches are going to do against the World Burner.”

  My gaze went to the stack of phototypes. Emman slid a few out of the way and came up with a detail shot of a detachable pod bracketed to one of the shock absorbers. It was a squat grey metal egg, unmarked and undecorated. A structural lattice had been built around it to provide mountings for antennae, thrusters, and spherical tanks. Clearly the thing was meant to detach and move around under its own power. Holding it to the shock absorber was a system of brackets that reached through the lattice to engage the grey egg directly. This detail had drawn notice from the Convox. Calculations had been done on the size of those brackets. They were strangely oversized. They only needed to be so large if the thing they were holding—the grey egg—were massive. Unbelievably massive. This was no ordinary pressure vessel. Perhaps it had extremely thick walls? But the calculations made no sense if you assumed any sort of ordinary metal. The only way to sort it—to account for the sheer number of protons and neutrons in that thing—was to assume it was made from a metal so far out at the end of the table of elements that its nuclei—in any cosmos—were unstable. Fissionable.

  This object was not just a tank. It was a thermonuclear device several orders of magnitude larger than the largest ever made on Arbre. The propellant tanks carried enough reaction mass to move it to an orbit antipodal to that of the mother ship. If it were detonated, it would shine enough radiant energy onto Arbre to set fire to whatever half of the planet could see it.

  “I don’t think that the Valers are really expecting to swarm over the World Burner in space suits and subdue it with fisticuffs,” I said. “Actually, what impressed me most about them was their knowledge of military history and tactics.”

  Emman held up his hands in surrender. “Don’t get me wrong. I would like to have them on my side.”

  Again, I couldn’t help but see a hidden meaning. But then a bell rang. Like animals in a lab, we had learned to tell the bells apart, so we didn’t have to look to know who it was for. Arsibalt took a final gulp from his flagon and hustled out.

  Moyra’s voice was coming through on the speaker: “Uthentine and Erasmas were Thousanders, so their treatise was not copied out into the mathic world until the Second Millennial Convox.” She was speaking of the two avout who had developed the notion of Complex Protism. “Even then, it received scant notice until the Twenty-seventh Century, when Fraa Clathrand, a Centenarian—later in his life, a Millenarian—at Saunt Edhar, casting an eye over these diagrams, remarked on the isomorphism between the causality-arrows in these networks, and the flow of time.”

  “Isomorphism meaning—?” asked Zh’vaern.

  “Sameness of form. Time flows, or seems to flow, in one direction,” Paphlagon said. “Events in the past can cause events in the present, but not vice versa, and time never loops round in a circle. Fraa Clathrand pointed out something noteworthy, which is that information about the cnoöns—the givens that flow along all of these arrows—behaves as if the cnoöns were in the past.”

  Again, Emman was staring off into space, drawing connections in his head. “Paphlagon is also a Hundreder from Edhar, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s probably how he got interested in this topic—probably found Clathrand’s manuscripts lying around somewhere.”

  “Twenty-seventh Century,” Emman repeated. “So, Clathrand’s works would’ve been distributed to the mathic world at large at the Apert of 2700?”

  I nodded.

  “Just eight decades before the rise of…” But he cut himself short and flicked his eyes nervously in my direction.

  “Before the Third Sack,” I corrected him.

  In the messallan, Lodoghir had been demanding an explanation. Moyra finally settled him down: “The entire premise of Protism is that the cnoöns can change us, in the quite literal and physical sense that they make our nerve tissue behave differently. But the reverse is not true. Nothing that goes on in our nerve tissue can make four into a prime number. All Clathrand was saying was that things in our past can likewise affect us in the present, but nothing we do in the present can affect the events of the past. And so here it seems we might have a perfectly commonplace explanation of something in these diagrams that might otherwise seem a bit mystical—namely, the purity and changelessness of cnoöns.”

  And here, just as Arsibalt had predicted, the conversation turned into a tutorial about light bubbles, which was an old scheme used by theors to keep track of how knowledge, and cause-and-effect relationships, propagated from place to place over time.

  “Very well,” said Zh’vaern eventually, “I’ll give you Clathrand’s Contention that any one of these DAGs—the Strider, the Wick, and so on—can be isomorphic to some arrangement of things in spacetime, influencing one another through propagation of information at the speed of light. But what does Clathrand’s Contention get us? Is he really asserting that the cnoöns are in the past? That we are just, somehow, remembering them?”

  “Perceiving—not remembering,” Paphlagon corrected him. “A cosmographer who sees a star blow up perceives everything about it in his present—though intellectually he knows it happened thousands of years ago and the givens are only now reaching the objective of his telescope.”

  “Fine—but my question stands.”

  It was unusual for Zh’vaern to become so involved in the dialog. Emman and I confirmed as much by giving each other quizzical looks. Perhaps the Matarrhite was actually getting ready to say something?

  “After the Apert of 2700, various theors tried to do various things with Clathrand’s Contention,” Moyra said, “each pursuing a different approach, depending on their understanding of time and their general approach to metatheorics. For example—”

  “It is too late in the evening for a recitation of examples,” said Ignetha Foral.

  Which chilled the whole room, and seemed to end the discussion, until Zh’vaern, in the ensuing silence, blurted out: “Does this have anything to do with the Third Sack?”

  A much longer silence followed.

  It was one thing for me and Emman, standing back in the kitchen, to mention this under our breath. Even then, I’d felt excruciatingly awkward. But for Zh’vaern to raise the topic in a messal attended (and under surveillance) by Saeculars, went far, far beyond disastrously rude. To imply that the avout were in any way to blame for the Third Sack—that was mere dinner-party-wrecking rudeness. But to plant such notions in the minds of extremely powerful Saeculars was a kind of recklessness verging on treason.

  Fraa Jad finally broke the silence with a chortling noise, so deep that it hardly came through on the sound system. “Zh’vaern violates a taboo!” he observed.

  “I see no reason why the topic should be off limits,” Zh’vaern said,
not in the least embarrassed.

  “How fared the Matarrhites in the Third Sack?” Jad asked.

  “According to the iconography of the time, we, as Deolaters, had nothing to do with Rhetors or Incanters and so were considered—”

  “Innocent of what we were guilty of?” said Asquin, who seemed to have chosen this moment to stop being nice.

  “Anyway,” Zh’vaern said, “we evacuated to an island, deep in the southern polar regions, and lived off the available plants, birds, and insects. That is where we developed our cuisine, which I know many of you find distasteful. We remember the Third Sack with every bite of food we take.”

  On the speaker I heard shifting, throat-clearing, and the clink of utensils for the first time since Zh’vaern had rolled his big stink-bomb into the middle of the table. But then he ruined it all by the way he volleyed the question back at Jad: “And your people? Edhar was one of the Inviolates, was it not?” Everyone tensed up again. Clathrand had come from Edhar; Zh’vaern seemed to have been developing a theory that Clathrand’s work had been the basis for the exploits of the Incanters; now he was drawing attention to the fact that Jad’s math had somehow managed to fend off the Sack for seven decades.

  “Fascinating!” Emman exclaimed. “How could this get any worse?”

  “I’m glad I’m not in there,” Tris said.

  “Arsibalt must be dying,” I said. A small noise in the back of the kitchen drew our notice: Orhan, Zh’vaern’s servitor, had been standing there silently the whole time. It was easy to forget he was there when you couldn’t see his face.

  “You just got to the Convox, Fraa Zh’vaern,” said Suur Asquin, “and so we’ll forgive you for not having heard, yet, what has become an open secret in the last few weeks: that the Three Inviolates are nuclear waste repositories, and as such were probably protected by the Saecular Power.”

  If this was news to Zh’vaern, he didn’t seem to find it very remarkable.

  “This is going nowhere,” announced Ignetha Foral. “Time to move on. The purpose of the Convox—and of this messal—is to get things done. Not to make friends or have polite conversations. The policy of what you call the Saecular Power toward the mathic world is what it is, and shall not be altered by a faux pas over dessert. The World Burner, you must know, has quite focused people’s minds—at least where I work.”

  “Where would you like the conversation to go tomorrow, Madame Secretary?” asked Suur Asquin. I didn’t have to see her face to know that the rebuke had really burned her.

  “I want to know who—what—the Geometers are, and where they came from,” said Ignetha Foral. “How they got here. If we have to discuss polycosmic metatheorics all evening long in order to answer those questions, so be it! But let us not speak of anything more that is not relevant to the matter at hand.”

  * * *

  Rebirth: The historical event dividing the Old Mathic Age from the Praxic Age, usually dated at around-500, during which the gates of the maths were thrown open and the avout dispersed into the Saecular world. Characterized by a sudden flowering of culture, theorical advancement, and exploration.

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

  I’d been flattering myself that Fraa Jad might want to talk to me; he had, after all, sent me off on a mission that had almost killed me three times. But unlike Moyra he was not the type to hang around in the kitchen post-messal, rapping with the servitors and washing dishes. By the time we were done cleaning up, he was gone to wherever it was that the Convox stowed Thousanders when not in use.

  It was just another reason I wanted to track down Lio. On the drive from Edhar to Bly’s Butte, Fraa Jad had confided in both of us—or so we believed—by dropping the hint that he was unnaturally old. If I were going to seek out Jad and take the dialog to the next stage—whatever that might be—Lio should be there with me.

  The only problem was that I seemed to have sprouted an entourage: Emman, Arsibalt, and Barb. If I led those three into a meeting of the seditious conspiracy of which Lio was now part, Arsibalt would black out and have to be dragged back to his cell, Barb would blab it to the whole Convox, and Emman would report us to the Panjandrums.

  While mopping the kitchen floor, I hit on the idea of leading them to Jesry’s Lucub instead. With luck, I could shed some or all of them there.

  As we were informed while trying to find Jesry—in Emman’s case, by a jeejah message, and for the rest of us, by coded bell-ringing from a carillon in the Precipice—Lucub had been canceled. Everything, in fact, except Laboratorium and Messal had been suspended until further notice, and the only reason we still had Messal was that we had to eat in order to work. The rest of the time, we were supposed to analyze the Geometers’ ship. The Saeculars had syntactic systems for building and displaying three-dimensional models of complicated objects, and so the goal, now, was to create such a model, correct down to the last strut, hatch, and weld, of the starship orbiting our planet—or at least of its outer shell, which was all of it we could see. Emman was proficient in the use of this modeling system, and so he was called away to toil in a Laboratorium with a lot of Ita. As I understood it, he wasn’t actually doing any modeling work—just getting the system to run. Those of us with theorical training had been assigned to new Laboratoria whose purpose was to pore over the phototypes from last night and integrate them into the model.

  Some such tasks were more demanding than others. The propulsion system, with jets of plasma interacting with the pusher plate, was difficult even for a Jesry to understand. He’d been assigned to penetrate the mysteries of the X-ray laser batteries. I was on a team analyzing the large-scale dynamics of the entire ship. We assumed that, inside of the icosahedron, some part of it rotated to create pseudo-gravity. So it was a huge gyroscope. When it maneuvered—as it had been forced to, last night—gyroscopic forces must be induced between the spun and despun sections, and those must be managed by bearings of some description. How great were those forces? And how did the thing maneuver, anyway? No jets—no rocket thrusters—had fired. No propulsion charges had detonated. And yet the Hedron had spun around with remarkable adroitness. The only reasonable explanation was that it contained a set of momentum wheels—rapidly spinning gyroscopes—that could be used to store and release angular momentum. Imagine a circular railway built around the inner surface of the icosahedron, making a complete circuit, and a freight train running around it in an eternal loop. If the train applied its brakes, it would dump some of its angular momentum into the icosahedron and force it to spin. By releasing the brakes and hitting the throttle, it could reverse the effect. As of last night, it was obvious that the Hedron contained half a dozen such systems—two, running opposite directions, on each of three axes. How big might they be, how much power could they exchange with the ship? What might that imply about what they were made of? More generally, by making precise measurements of how the Hedron had maneuvered, what could we infer about the size, mass, and spin rate of the inhabited section that was hidden inside?

  Arsibalt was put on a team using spectroscopy and other givens to figure out which parts of the ship had been forged in which cosmi; or had it all been made in one cosmos? Barb was assigned to make sense of a triangulated network of struts that had been observed projecting from the despun part of the ship. And so on. So six hours now went by during which I was completely absorbed in the problem to which I, and a team of five other theors, had been assigned. I didn’t have a moment to think about anything else until someone pointed out that the sun was rising, and we received a message that food was to be had on the great plaza that spread before the Mynster, at the foot of the Precipice.

  Walking there, I tried to force gyroscope problems out of my head for a few minutes and consider the larger picture. Ignetha Foral had made no secret of her impatience yesterday evening. We’d emerged from the messal to find ourselves in a Convox that had abruptly been reorganized—along Saecular lines. All of us were like praxics now, working on small bits of a problem
whose entirety we might never get to see. Was this a permanent change? How would it affect the movement Lio had spoken of? Was it a deliberate strategy by which the Panjandrums intended to snuff that movement out? What Lio had told me had made me anxious, and I’d been afraid of what I might learn if I ever found my way to Ala’s Lucub. So I was relieved that it had been put into suspended animation. The conspiracy could have made no progress last night. But another part of me was concerned about how it might respond to being driven further underground.

  Breakfast was being served out of doors, at long tables that the military had set up on the plaza. Convenient for us—but weirdly and intrusively Saecular in style, and another hint that the Mathic hierarchs had lost or ceded power to the Panjandrums.

  Emerging from the line with a hunk of bread, butter, and honey, I saw a small woman just in the act of taking a seat at an otherwise vacant table. I walked over quickly and took the seat across from her. The table was between us, so there was no awkwardness as to whether we should hug, kiss, or shake hands. She knew I was there, but remained huddled over her plate for a long moment, staring at her food, and, I thought, gathering her strength, before she raised her eyes and gazed into mine.

  “Is this seat taken?” asked an approaching fraa in a complicated bolt, giving me the sort of ingratiating look I’d learned to associate with those who wanted to suck up to Edharians.

  “Bugger off!” I said. He did.

  “I sent you a couple of letters,” I said. “Don’t know if you got them.”

  “Osa handed one to me,” she said. “I didn’t open it until after what happened with Orolo.”

  “Why not?” I asked, trying to make my voice gentle. “I know about Jesry—”

  The big eyes closed in pain—no—in exasperation, and she shook her head. “Forget about that. It’s just that too much else has been going on. I’ve not wanted to get distracted.” She leaned back against her folding chair, heaved a sigh. “After the Visitation of Orithena, I thought maybe I had better open up. Zoom out, as the extras say. I read your letter. I think—” Her brow folded. “I don’t know what I think. It’s like I’ve had three different lifetimes. Before Voco. Between Voco and Orolo’s death. And since then. And your letter—which was a respectable piece of work, don’t get me wrong—was written to an Ala two lifetimes gone.”