Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  “Hello!” called Jules, more as an exclamation than a greeting. It took us a moment to understand that he was responding to a face that had appeared in the porthole of the hatch: some cosmographer come to see why the big scope had gone dark. Based on Jules’s lessons, I guessed, from the hue of her eyes and the shape of her nostrils, that she was Fthosian. And, though it would take some time to learn Fthosian facial expressions, I reckoned I had now seen two of them: befuddlement followed by shock as a matte black space suit of unfamiliar design loomed in her window. Jules grabbed handles flanking the hatch and pressed his face plate against the glass. Then we all had to turn down the volume in our phones as he began to holler in what I assumed was Fthosian. The woman inside got the idea and pressed her ear against the window. Sound would not travel through the vacuum of space, but, by shouting loud enough, Jules could excite vibrations in his face-mask that would be transmitted by direct contact into the glass of the porthole and thence into the cosmographer’s ear.

  He repeated himself. He somehow managed to sound more cheerful than desperate. His tone seemed to say it was all in good sport. The woman’s lips moved as she shouted back.

  The dome illuminated. I reckoned she’d hit the light switch, to get a better look at what was going on. But on second thought this light was pouring in through the gap between the hemispheres. The sun must have risen? We’d been warned of explosive sunrises. But this seemed explosive in more ways than one; the light flared, faded, and flared brighter. It burbled and boiled. A silent concussion passed through the frame of the icosahedron. Lio sprang up so smartly that he almost committed the fatal mistake of flying straight up out of the dome and off into space. But he caught himself short by gripping the comm wire that linked him to the rest of us, and swung around above the telescope mirror until he finally contrived to stop himself short on the edge of a dome-half. The light, which was slowly dying, reflected in his face mask. “The World Burner,” he said, “I think they must have blown the propellant tanks.” Then, with a sudden exclamation, he pushed off and glided back “down” to what I was thinking of as the floor of the dome. For the giant hemispheres had gone into movement, and the slit between them was narrowing decisively. The lights really did come on now.

  The slit disappeared with a clunk, felt not heard. For better or worse, we were trapped here now. I kept eyeing the big red emergency button. I had eight minutes.

  A readout on my display began to change: outside air pressure, which had been a red zero ever since I’d been launched into the vacuum of space, was climbing up toward the yellow zone. Jules had noticed the same thing; he went over to a grated vent near the hatch and reached for it. His arm was batted aside by inrushing air.

  “Thank Cartas,” Arsibalt said, “I don’t care what cosmos this air came from. I just want to breathe it.”

  “While we are waiting, re-acquaint yourselves with the doffing procedure,” Lio told us. “And show yourselves.” He pulled up the screen that had been hiding his readouts. The rest of us did likewise. For the first time in a couple of hours we were able to see one another’s faces on the speely screens and to check one another’s readouts. I could not see everyone in the group, because we were distributed around a cluttered and complex space “beneath” the mirror supports. But I could see Jesry, who had two minutes. I had five. I swapped canisters with him; it was taking a long time to pressurize the dome.

  A few minutes later the external pressure readout finally changed from yellow to green: good enough to breathe. Just as my oxygen supply indicator was going from red (extreme danger) to black (you are dead). With my last lungful of Arbre air I spoke the command that opened my suit to the surrounding atmosphere. My ears popped. My nose stung, and registered a funny smell: that of something, anything, other than my own body. Lio, who’d been keeping a sharp eye on my readouts (I had less oxygen than anyone else that I could see), stepped behind me and hauled the back of my suit open. I withdrew my arms, got a grip on the rim of the HTU, and pulled myself, stark naked, out of the accursed thing. I breathed alien air. My comrades watched me with no small interest. The only other Arbran to have breathed this stuff had been the Warden of Heaven, who apparently hadn’t lasted more than a few minutes. My hands flew to my face. I kneaded it, scratched my nose, rubbed a week’s sleep from my eyes, ran my fingers up into my hair. Could have thought of more edifying things to do, but it was a biological imperative.

  Lio groped on his front, found a switch, flicked it. “Can you hear me?”

  “Yeah, I can hear you.” The others took to groping for their switches.

  “Not that it makes a difference—since we all have to get out—but what is it like, my fraa?”

  “My heart is pounding like crazy,” I said, and paused, since to say that much had worn me out. “I thought I was just excited, but—maybe this air doesn’t work for us.” I was speaking in bursts between gasps for air; my body was telling me to breathe faster. “I can see why the Warden of Heaven blew an aneurysm.”

  “Raz?”

  Breathe, breathe. “Yeah?” Breathe breathe breathe…

  “Get me out of this thing!” Lio insisted.

  Jesry grabbed Lio, spun him around, yanked his door open. Lio got out of his suit as if it were on fire. He floated over with a mad look on his face. All my habits from home told me to get out of Lio’s way when he approached in that mood, but I simply didn’t have the strength. His arms, which had subjected me to so much rough treatment over the years, came around me in a bear hug. He pressed his ear against my chest. His scalp was like thistles. I felt his rib cage begin heaving. Jesry and Arsibalt and Jules were swimming free of their suits. Jules went straight to the hatch, threw a lever, and shoved it open. Everything faded—not to darkness but to a washed-out yellow-gray, as if too much light were shining through it.

  Fraa Jad and I were floating in a white corridor. I was naked. He was dressed in one of the grey coveralls we’d brought up in our kit. Evidence suggested he had been rummaging in a steel locker set into the wall. Two clumps of silvery fabric were floating near him. He teased one open. It turned out to have arms and legs. From time to time he glanced my way. When he noticed me looking at him, he tossed me a grey packet in a poly bag: another folded-up coverall. “Put this on,” he said. “Then, over it, the silver garment.”

  “Are we going to put out a fire?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  The effort of tearing open the poly wrapper set my heart pounding. Pulling on the coverall plunged me deep into oxygen debt. Once I had recovered enough to get a few words out, I asked, “Where are the others?”

  “There is a Narrative, not terribly dissimilar to the one you and I are perceiving, in which they went to explore the ship. Their plan is to surrender peacefully whenever someone notices them.”

  “Is there any particular reason they left us behind?”

  “Emergence from the suit after so long. Finding oneself in a confined space after having grown accustomed to the unobstructed vastness. Breathing an atmosphere from a different cosmos. Effects of long-term weightlessness. General stress and excitement. All of these induce a syndrome that lasts for a few minutes, a kind of going into shock, that can produce confusion or even loss of consciousness. Soon it passes, if one is healthy. I infer that it was too much for the Warden of Heaven.”

  “So,” I tried, “after we doffed the suits, we were all confused or unconscious for a few minutes. Meaning—in your system of thought—we lost our grip on the Narrative. Stopped tracking it. Whatever faculty of consciousness enables it continuously to do the fly-bat-worm trick—it shut down for a while, there.”

  “Yes. And the others regained consciousness in a worldtrack in which you and I are dead.”

  “Dead.”

  “That is what I told you.”

  “So that’s why they left us behind,” I said. “They didn’t leave us behind, because, in their worldtrack, we never even made it here.”

  “Yes. Put this on.” He h
anded me a full-face respirator.

  “What of the Fthosian astronomer? Won’t she summon the authorities, or something?”

  “She went with Jules. He is talking to her. He has a gift for that kind of thing.”

  “So Lio, Arsibalt, Jesry, and Sammann are just wandering around the ship openly, looking for someone to surrender to?”

  “Such a worldtrack exists.”

  “It’s pretty bizarre.”

  “Not at all. Such occurrences are common in the confusion of war.”

  “How about this worldtrack? What are the four of them doing in the Narrative that you and I are in?”

  “I’m in several,” Fraa Jad said, “a state of affairs that is not easy to sustain. Your questions hardly make it easier. So here is a simple answer. The others are all dead.”

  “I don’t wish to abide in a worldtrack where my friends are all dead,” I said. “Take me back to the other one.”

  “There is no taking, and there is no back,” Jad said. “Only going, and forward.”

  “I don’t want to be in a Narrative where my friends are dead,” I insisted.

  “Then you have two choices: put yourself out the airlock, or follow me.” And Fraa Jad pulled the respirator over his face, terminating our conversation. He handed me a fire extinguisher, and took one for himself. Then he shoved off down the corridor.

  Now my mind did something absurd, namely, attended to the nuts and bolts of the ship instead of things that were truly important. It was as though some Barb-like part of me had stepped to the fore, elbowed my soul out of the way, and directed all of my energies and faculties toward those things that Barb would find interesting, such as door-latching mechanisms. Subsystems responsible for irrelevancies such as grieving for my friends, fearing death, being confused about the worldtracks, and wanting to strangle Fraa Jad, were starved of resources.

  There were many doors, all closed but not locked. This was, according to Jules, the usual state of affairs here. These outer reaches of the ship were divided into separate, independently pressurized compartments so that a meteor strike in one wouldn’t beggar its neighbors. Consequently, one spent an inordinate amount of time opening and closing doors. These were domed round hatches about three feet in diameter, with heavy bank-vault-like latching mechanisms. One opened them by grabbing two symmetrical handles and pulling them opposite ways, which was handy in zero gravity where planting one’s feet and using one’s body weight were not supported by theorical law. The effort always left me panting for breath in Fraa Jad’s wake. One of the questions I had meant to annoy him with had been, Why me? Can’t you do whatever it is you are doing alone, so that I can be in a Narrative where my friends are alive? And maybe this was the answer. I’d been picked out for the same reason that the hierarchs at Edhar had made me part of the bell-ringing team: I was a lummox. I could open heavy doors. It seemed preferable to doing nothing, so I floated ahead of Fraa Jad and applied myself to it. Every time I hauled one open I expected to find myself staring down the muzzle of an Urnudan space marine’s weapon, but there simply weren’t that many people here in the observatory, and when we did finally encounter someone in a corridor, she gasped and got out of our way. The firefighter disguise was so simple, so obvious, I’d assumed it could never work. But it had worked perfectly on the first person we’d met, which probably meant it would work as well on the next hundred.

  That corridor led to a spherical chamber that apparently served as the foyer for the whole vertex. We had to pass through it, anyway, to get out of this vertex and reach other parts of the Daban Urnud. As we discovered by trial and error, one of its exits communicated with a very long tubular shaft. “The Tendon,” I announced, when I discovered it. Fraa Jad nodded and launched himself down it.

  The stupendous icosahedron and its imposing vertex-citadels had accounted for almost all of my impressions of the ship until now. Their size and their strangeness made it easy to forget that essentially all of the Daban Urnud’s complexity and population lay elsewhere: in the spinning Orbstack. Until now, Fraa Jad and I had been like a couple of barbarians kicking down doors in an abandoned guardhouse on the frontier of an empire. Here, though, we had set out on the road that would take us to the capital. There were a dozen Tendons. Six radiated from each of the mighty bearings at the ends of the Orbstack. The Orbstack was like a monkey using its arms and legs to brace itself in the middle of a packing crate. Sometimes an arm had to push, sometimes it had to pull. It flexed to absorb shocks. It was alive: a bundle of bones that gave strength, muscles that reacted, vessels that transported materials, nerves that communicated, and skin that protected all of the rest. The Tendons had to perform all of the same functions, and so shared much of that complexity. All that Fraa Jad and I could see of this Tendon was the inner surface of a ten-foot-diameter shaft, but we knew from talking to Jules that the Tendon as a whole was more than a hundred feet wide, and crammed with structure and detail hidden from our view—but richly hinted at by a bewilderingly various series of hatches, valve-wheels, wiring panels, display screens, control panels, and signs that shimmered by us as we flew along. Since it was impossible for novices such as we to get aimed perfectly down the center, we strayed from side to side as we went along. Whenever we came in slapping range of a likely-looking handhold we’d give it a bit of abuse and earn some speed, then take a lot of deep breaths while coasting to the next. About halfway along, we encountered a group of four Geometers who, when they saw us coming, grabbed handholds and crouched against the wall to make way. As we flew by, they shouted what I assumed were questions, which we had little choice but to ignore.

  The hatch at the end opened onto a domed chamber about a hundred feet across: by far the largest open volume we had yet seen. I knew it had to be the forward bearing chamber. This was confirmed by the fact that it had a navel in its floor, perhaps twenty feet across, and everything that we could see on the other side of it was rotating. We had reached the forward end of the Core. Surrounding but invisible to us was the immense bearing that connected the spinning Orbstack to the non-spinning complex of icosahedron and Tendons that guarded it.

  It was a mess. Half a dozen Tendon-shafts were plumbed into this thing via huge portals shot into its domed “ceiling.” Fraa Jad and I had just emerged from one of them. The adjacent one was the focus of a huge amount of activity and attention—it looked like one of those pits in great cities where stocks are traded. This, of course, was the Tendon that led to the World Burner complex, or what was left of it now that the Valers had got to it. People were flying in to, or issuing from, it at a rate of about two per second—it was like watching the entrance of a hornet’s nest in high summer. Most of those going into it were carrying weapons or tools. Some of those coming out were injured. The ingoing and outcoming streams collided in the bearing chamber, and others tried to sort things out, to tell people where to go, what to do, without much result that I could discern, save that they ended up arguing with each other. I was just as happy I couldn’t understand what they were saying. The chaos made it almost too easy for me and Fraa Jad to move around without attracting notice. In fact, my only problem was distinguishing the Thousander from other men in firefighting gear. But after a brief moment of anxiety when I feared I’d lost him, I spied a likely-looking firefighter gazing in my direction and pointing toward what I had begun to think of as the floor of the chamber: the flat surface with the big hole in the middle of it.

  The hole was getting smaller.

  As Jules had explained, wherever the Daban Urnud’s architects had needed to forge a connection between major parts of the Core, they had used a ball valve, which was just a sphere with a fat hole drilled through the middle, held captive in a spherical cavity bridging the two spaces in question. The sphere couldn’t go anywhere, but it was free to rotate. Depending on how the hole in its middle was aligned, it could allow free passage or form an impregnable barrier. Such a valve was set into the “floor” of this chamber. It was so huge that, at first, I
hadn’t seen it for what it was. But now that it had gone into motion, its nature and its function were perfectly obvious. It moved ponderously, but by the time Fraa Jad managed to draw my attention to it, the thing was already about half closed, like an eyeball slowly drifting into sleep.

  Fraa Jad planted his feet against a soldier’s backside and shoved off, driving the soldier toward the ceiling and Jad down toward the ball valve. I was already near a sort of ladder or catwalk, which I pushed off against to propel myself after him. When we got to the ball valve, the aperture had narrowed to perhaps three feet at its widest—plenty of room to squeeze through. But we had used up all of our momentum just getting there, and our aim had been miserable. After some feverish banging around we drifted through the aperture and found ourselves hovering in the bore of the sphere, watching the eye at its other end get smaller. There were no handholds that we could use to move ourselves along. If we didn’t reach the other end by the time it closed, we’d be imprisoned until the next time they opened the valve.