Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  “Can we get a conversion factor—” Jesry said, in a tone that said I’ll be damned if I let this conversation wander.

  “That’s what I’ve been working on,” said Sammann, nodding thanks to Arsibalt. He took a draught of water. Elkhazg was in a climate that sucked the moisture out of you. “Problem is, Jules is a linguist. Hasn’t paid a lot of attention to this. Knows the timeline in Urnud years—which is their standard unit up there—but not the conversion factor to Arbre years. Anyway, I was able to back it out from some clues—”

  “What clues?” Jesry demanded.

  “While the rest of us were evacuating Tredegarh, a unit of Valers assaulted the quarters of the so-called Matarrhites, and captured a lot of documents and syndevs before the Urnud/Tro guys could destroy them. My brethren are still virtualizing the syndevs—never mind—but some of the documents have timestamps in Urnud units, which can be matched against recent events on our calendar.”

  “Wait a moment, please, how can we even read a document in Urnudan?” Arsibalt asked, sitting down and helping himself to the other heel.

  “We can’t. But a cryptanalyst can easily see that many of the documents have the same format, which includes a string of characters readily decipherable as a timestamp. And they have a special, phonetic alphabet for transliterating proper names; they haul it out and dust it off whenever they encounter a new planet. This too is elementary to decipher. So if we see a document that has the phonetic transcription of Jesry and of his loctor at the Plenary—”

  “We can infer it must be a report of the Plenary I participated in after I came back from space,” Jesry said, “and we know the Arbre date of that event. Very well. I agree that such givens would enable you to begin estimating a conversion factor relating Arbran to Urnudan years.”

  “Yes,” said Sammann. “And there is still some error margin, but I believe that, in Arbran years, the Urnudans began their inter-cosmic journey 910 years ago, plus or minus 20.”

  “Somewhere between 890 and 930 years ago,” I translated, but that was the limit of my arithmetical powers so early in the morning. Sammann was glaring fiercely into my eyes, willing me to wake up a little faster, to go the next step, but mere calculation was not my strong suit, especially when I had an audience.

  “Between 2760 and 2800 A.R.?” said a new voice: Lio, coming across the cloister with Jules Verne Durand. These two did not look as if they’d only just gotten up; I guessed Lio had been pumping the Laterran for information.

  “Yes!” Sammann said. “The time of the Third Sack.”

  One of Magnath Foral’s staff came out with a huge bowl of peeled and cut-up fruit and began ladling it into bowls, which we passed around.

  Jules tore off a piece of bread and began to eat it. This surprised me at first, since he could not derive any nutritional value from it; but I reasoned it would fill his stomach and make him feel less hungry.

  “Wait a second,” Jesry said, “are you trying to develop a theory that there’s a cause-and-effect relationship at work? That the Urnudans began their journey because of events that took place here on Arbre?”

  “I’m just saying it is a coincidence that needs looking at,” Sammann said.

  We ate and thought. I had a head start on the eating, so I briefed Jesry and Lio—as well as others who drifted in, such as three of the Valers—on the conversations we’d had in the Plurality of Worlds Messal about the Wick and the idea that Arbre might be the HTW of other worlds, such as Urnud. The newcomers then had to be brought up to speed on the first part of this morning’s conversation, so the conversation forked and devolved into a general hubbub for a couple of minutes.

  “So information could flow from Arbre to Urnud, in that scenario,” Jesry concluded, loudly enough to shut everyone up and retake the floor. “But why would the Third Sack trigger such behavior on the part of an Urnudan star captain?”

  “Fraa Jesry, remember the margin of error that Sammann was careful to specify,” Arsibalt said. “The trigger could have been anything that happened in this cosmos in the four decades beginning around 2760. And I’ll remind you that this would include—”

  “Events leading up to the Third Sack,” I blurted.

  Silence. Discomfort. Averted gazes. Except for Jules Verne Durand, who was staring right at me and nodding. I recalled his willingness to broach excruciating topics at Messal, and decided to draw strength from that. “I’m done tiptoeing around this topic,” I said. “It all fits together. Fraa Clathrand of Edhar was the tip of an iceberg. Others back then—who knows how many thousands?—worked on a praxis of some kind. Procians and Halikaarnians alike. It’s hard to know the truth of what this praxis was capable of. The parking ramp dinosaur hints at what it could do when they made mistakes. We know what the Saeculars thought of it, how they reacted. The records were destroyed, the practitioners massacred—except in the Three Inviolates. There’s no telling what people like Fraa Jad have been up to since then. I’ll bet they’ve just been nursing it along—”

  “Keeping the pilot light burning,” Lio called.

  “Yeah,” I said. “But something about what they did, circa 2760, when the praxis reached its zenith, sent out a signal that propagated down the Wick, and was noticed, somehow, by the theors of Urnud.”

  “It drew them here, you’re saying,” said Lio, “like a dinner bell.”

  “Like the fragrance of this bread,” I said.

  “Perhaps it’s not just the smell of the bread that has drawn others to this room, Fraa Erasmas,” Arsibalt suggested. “Perhaps it is the sound of the conversation. Half-overheard words, not understandable at a distance, but enough to pique the interest of any sentient person in range of the voices.”

  “You’re saying that’s what it might have been like to the Urnudan theors on that ship,” I said, “when they received—I don’t know—emanations, hints, signals, percolating down the Wick from Arbre.”

  “Precisely,” said Arsibalt.

  We all turned to Jules. He had removed some Laterran food from a bag and—having sated his appetite with stuff he could not digest—was now eating a few bites of what his body could use. He noticed the attention, shrugged, and swallowed. “Do not hold your breath waiting for an explanation from the Pedestal. Those of 900 years ago were rational theors, to be sure. But during the long, dark years of their wandering, it became something better recognizable as a priesthood. And the closer these priests get to their god, the more they fear it.”

  “I wonder if we might calm them down just a little by getting them to see they’re not actually that close,” Jesry said.

  “What do you mean?” Yul asked.

  “Fraa Jad’s an interesting guy and all,” Jesry said, “but he doesn’t seem like a god, or even a prophet, to me. Whatever it is that he’s doing when he chants, or plays Teglon all night, I don’t think it is godlike. I think he’s just picking up signals coming to Arbre from farther up the Wick.”

  By now everyone had showed up and eaten except for Fraa Jad. We found him sitting in the middle of the Decagon, eating some food that had been brought out to him by the staff. The Decagon looked altogether different. When we had passed across it yesterday, it had been paved in hand-sized clay tiles, dark brown, and grooved: just like the ones I’d played with at Orithena, except proportionally smaller. The groove seemed to run unbroken from one vertex to the opposite—I had not taken the time to verify this, but I assumed it was a correct solution. For those who wanted to try their hands at it, baskets of white porcelain tiles, marked with black glazed lines instead of grooves, had been stacked all around the edges. This morning, though, the baskets were empty, and Fraa Jad was enjoying his breakfast on a seamless white courtyard decorated with a wandering black line. During the night he had tiled the whole thing. When we understood this, we burst into applause. Arsibalt and Jesry were shouting as if at a ball game. The Valers approached Fraa Jad and bowed very low.

  Out of curiosity, I backtracked to the outskirts of the Decagon and
stepped off its edge—for the surface was several inches higher than the adjoining pavement. I squatted down and lifted up one of Jad’s white tiles to expose a small patch of brown tiling underneath. Jad’s was, as I’d expected, a wholly different solution of the Teglon—the positions of the older brown tiles didn’t match up with those of the new ones, proving that Fraa Jad had not merely copied the older solution.

  “It is the fourth,” said a gentle voice. I looked up to find Magnath Foral watching me. He nodded at the tile in my hand. Looking more closely at the edge of the Decagon, I perceived, now, that underneath the brown tiles was a layer of green ones, and below that, one of terra-cotta.

  “Well,” I said, “I guess you need to bake up a new set of tiles.”

  Foral nodded, and said, deadpan: “I don’t think there is any great hurry.”

  I set the white tile back into its place, stood up, and took a step up to the Decagon. It was open to the sky. I craned my neck and looked straight up. “Think they noticed?” I asked. Magnath Foral got a bemused look and said nothing.

  Cell 317 moved on to convene in a courtyard we’d not visited yesterday. This one was circular, and roofed by a living bower. They had somehow trained half a dozen enormous flowering vines to arch across the top of the space and grapple with one another to form a stable dome of interlocked branches, fifty feet above the ground. Dappled light shone through it to illuminate the cool space below, but seen from above it would look like a hemisphere of solid green, freckled with color. Pallets of mysterious but expensive-looking stuff had been stationed around the edge of the yard. We devoted the remainder of the morning to breaking these open, getting rid of packaging materials, and drawing up an inventory: mindless labor that everyone badly needed.

  That we’d be going into space was obvious from the nature of this stuff. By weight, it was ninety-nine percent containers. We were opening beautiful twenty-pound lockers to find pieces of equipment that weighed as much as dried flowers. We shed our bolts and chords in favor of nearly weightless charcoal-grey coveralls. “It’s all for the best,” Jesry said, eyeing me. “In zero gravity, the bolt doesn’t hang, if you get my meaning. Things would get ugly fast.”

  “Speak for yourself,” I said. “Anything else I need to know?”

  “If you get sick—which you will—it’ll last for three days. After that, you get better or you get used to it. I’m not sure which.”

  “Do you think we’ll even have three days?”

  “If they were only sending us up as a diversion—”

  “Just to get killed, you mean?”

  “Yeah—then they could just send Procians.”

  Our conversation had begun to draw in others, such as the Valers, who did not understand Jesry’s sense of humor. He cleared his throat and called out, “What is happening, my fraa?” to Lio.

  Lio sprang to the top of a tarp-covered pallet, and everyone went silent.

  “We’re not allowed to know yet what the mission is,” he began, “or why we’re doing it. We just have to get there.”

  “Get where?” Yul demanded.

  “That Daban Urnud,” Lio said.

  Not that we hadn’t been paying attention, but: we were really paying attention now. Everyone seemed brighter. Especially Jules. “Food, here I come.”

  “How are we going to get aboard a heavily armed—” Arsibalt began to ask.

  “We haven’t been told that yet,” Lio said. “Which is just fine, because simply getting off the ground is difficult enough. We can’t use the normal launch sites. I would presume that the Pedestal have threatened to rod them if they notice launch preparations. That means we can’t use the usual rockets, because those are tailor-made to be launched only from those sites. And that, in turn, means we can’t use the usual space vehicles—such as the one you rode on, Jesry—because those can only be launched by said rockets. But there is an alternative. During the last big war, a family of ballistic missiles was developed. They use storable propellants and they launch from the backs of vehicles that ramble around the countryside on treads.”

  “That can’t work,” Jesry protested. “A ballistic missile doesn’t get its payload to orbit. It merely throws a warhead at the other side of the world.”

  “But suppose you take off that warhead and replace it with something like this,” Lio said. He jumped down, got a grip on the tarp, collected himself, and snapped it away with a forceful movement of the hips and the arms. Revealed was a piece of equipment not a great deal larger than a major household appliance. “A gazebo on top of a welding rig” was how Yul might have described it, if only he had been here. The “gazebo” was a very small one—though, as Lio demonstrated, it was large enough to house one person in a fetal position. Its roof was a lens of pressed sheet metal with some sort of hard coating. It was supported by four legs: spindly-looking, triangulated struts, like miniature radio towers.

  So the gazebo had a roof and pillars, but it lacked a floor. In lieu of that were only three lugs projecting inward from a structural ring. At the moment, these were spanned by a sheet of plywood, which supported Lio’s back as he curled up on top of it. Once he rolled out, though, he took the plywood away to reveal nothing below except for structural members and plumbing. There were two big tanks—a torus encircling a sphere—and several smaller ones, all spherical, and none larger than what you’d see on the shelves of a sporting goods store. These were profoundly ensnared in plumbing and cable-harnesses. Sticking out the bottom, like an insect’s stinger, was a rocket nozzle, dismayingly small. “The real one will have a nozzle skirt bolted onto it,” Lio informed us, “as big again as this whole stage.”

  “Stage!?” Sammann exclaimed. “You mean, as in—”

  “Yes!” said Lio. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I’m sorry I wasn’t clearer. This is the upper stage of a rocket. There’s one for each of us.” Then, so that we could get a better view of the nozzle, he grabbed a strut with one hand and hauled up. The entire stage rocked back, exposing the underside.

  “You’ve got to be kidding!” I exclaimed, and put my hand next to his and shouldered him out of the way. He let it drop into my hand. The entire stage weighed considerably less than I did. Then everyone else had to try it.

  “Where’s the rest of it?” Jesry asked.

  There was an awkward silence.

  “This is the whole thing,” proclaimed Jules Verne Durand, understanding it perfectly, even though he was seeing it for the first time. “The conception is monyafeek!”

  “Well, since you appear to be an expert on monyafeeks,” Jesry said, “maybe you could tell us how four legs and a roof are going to contain a pressurized atmosphere!”

  “It’s not called a monyafeek,” Lio protested mildly. “It’s a—oh, never mind.”

  “We will have only space suits, am I right?” Jules asked, looking to Lio.

  Lio nodded. “Jules gets it. Since we need space suits anyway, complete with life support and sanitation and all the rest, it’d be redundant to send up a pressurized capsule comprising extra copies of the same systems.”

  I was expecting Jesry to lodge further protests but he underwent a sudden conversion, and held up both hands to silence murmurs. “I have been there,” he reminded us, “and I can tell you there is no part of the shared space capsule experience I’m eager to relive. You don’t know the meaning of nasty until you’ve been blindsided by a drifting blob of someone else’s vomit. Don’t even get me started on what passes for toilets. How hard it is to see out those tiny windows. I think this is a great idea: each of us sealed up in our own personal spaceship, keeping our farts to ourselves, enjoying the panoramic view out the facemask.”

  “How long is it possible to live in a space suit?” I asked.

  “You’re going to love this,” Jesry proclaimed, taking the floor with a nod from Lio. Jesry strode over to where he, with help from Fraa Gratho, had, for the last hour or so, been assembling space suits. He approached one that seemed to be complete, and s
lapped a green metal canister socketed into the suit’s backpack. “Liquid oxygen! A whole four hours’ supply, right here.”

  “Provided you show discipline in its use,” put in Suur Vay.

  “Liquid!? As in cryogenic?” Sammann asked.

  “Of course.”

  “How long will it stay cold?”

  “In space? It’s not such an issue. It’ll stay cold as long as the fuel cell has fuel to run the chiller.” Slapping a red canister, he went on, “Liquid hydrogen. Easy on, easy off.” He twisted it off, showed us some kind of complicated latching/gasket hardware, then twisted it back on.

  “So we’re competing against a fuel cell for the available oxygen?” Arsibalt asked.

  “Think of it as coöperation.”

  “What about waste products?” someone asked, but Jesry was ready. “Carbon dioxide is scrubbed here.” He twisted off a white can and waved it around. “When it’s used up, slap on a new one. Then—you’ll like this—take the old one over to the tender.” He paced over to a separate piece of equipment that looked as if it belonged to the same genus, but a different species, from the space suits. It had color-coded sockets all over it for tanks and canisters. He jacked the scrubber onto one of these. “It bakes the CO2 out of the scrubber. When this bar has changed color”—he pointed to an indicator on the side of the can—“it’s ready to use again.”

  “This device is also a reservoir of air and fuel?” asked Suur Vay, eyeing the sockets for oxygen and hydrogen canisters.

  “If it’s available, this is where you’ll get it,” Jesry said. “It’s meant to be connected to a water bladder and an energy supply—usually solar panels, but in our case, a little nuke. It breaks the water down into hydrogen and oxygen, liquefies them, and fills any tank you slap onto it. And it uses heat to recycle the scrubbers, as I was saying. Likewise, when your waste bags fill up—we’ll discuss those later—you attach them here—” pointing fastidiously to an array of yellow fittings.

  “Do you mean to say we’ll be defecating inside the suits?” Arsibalt asked.