Anathem

  That’s when Cord saw the point I was making. “This,” she said, pointing at the tablet, “this has got to have some kind of syndev built into it.”

  “Yes. Which makes it much more powerful than a phototype—just as your five-axis mill is much more powerful because of its brain.”

  “But isn’t that a violation of your Discipline?”

  “Certain praxes were grandfathered in. Like the newmatter in our spheres and our bolts, and like these tablets.”

  “They were grandfathered in—when? When were all of these decisions made?”

  “At the Convoxes following the First and Second Sacks,” I said. “You see, even after the end of the Praxic Age, the concents obtained a huge amount of power by coupling processors that had been invented by their syntactic faculties to other kinds of tools—in one case, for making newmatter, and in the other, for manipulating sequences. This reminded people of the Terrible Events and led to the First and Second Sacks. Our rules concerning the Ita, and which praxes we can and can’t use, date from those times.”

  This was still too abstract for Cord’s taste, but suddenly she got an idea, and her eyes sprang open. “Are you talking about the Incanters?”

  Out of some stupid, involuntary reflex, I turned my head to look out the window in the direction of the Millenarian math, a fortress on a crag, on a level with the top of this tower, but shielded from view by its walls. Cord took this in. Worse, she seemed to have expected it.

  “The myth of the Incanters originated in the days leading up to the Third Sack,” I said.

  “And their enemies—the what-do-you-call-’em…”

  “Rhetors.”

  “Yeah. What’s the difference exactly?” She was giving me the most innocent, expectant look, twirling her watch chain around her finger. I couldn’t bear to level with her—to let her know what stupid questions she was asking. “Uh, if you’ve been watching those kinds of speelies, you know more about it than I do,” I said. “One sort of glib explanation I heard once was that Rhetors could change the past, and were glad to do it, but Incanters could change the future—and were reluctant.”

  She nodded as if this weren’t a load of rubbish. “Forced to by what the Rhetors had done.”

  I shrugged. “Again: it all depends on what work of fiction you happen to be enjoying—”

  “But those guys would be Incanters,” she said, nodding at the crag.

  I was getting a little restless, so I led her back out onto the open roof, where she immediately turned her gaze back to the Thousanders’ math. I finally worked it out that she was merely trying to reassure herself that the strange people living up there on the crag that loomed over her town were not dangerous. And I was happy to help her, especially if she might go out and spread the good news to others. That sort of fence-mending was the whole purpose of Apert.

  But I didn’t want to lie to her either. “Our Thousanders are a little different,” I said. “Down in the other maths, like the one where I live, different orders are mixed together. But up on the crag, they all belong to one order: the Edharians. Who trace their lineage back to Halikaarn. And to the extent there is any truth whatsoever in the folk tales you’re talking about, that would put them on the Incanter side of things.”

  That seemed to satisfy her where Rhetor/Incanter wars were concerned. We continued wandering around the starhenge, though I had to give wide berth to an Ita who emerged from a utility shack with a coil of red cable slung over his shoulder. Cord noticed this. “What’s the point of having the Ita around if you have to go to all of this trouble to avoid them? Wouldn’t it be simpler to send them packing?”

  “They keep certain parts of the clock running…”

  “I could do that. It’s not that hard.”

  “Well…to tell you the truth, we ask ourselves the same question.”

  “And being who you are, you must have twelve different answers.”

  “There is a sort of traditional belief that they spy on us for the Saecular Power.”

  “Ah. Which is why you despise them.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What makes you think they’re spying on you?”

  “Voco. An aut where a fraa or suur is called out from the math—Evoked—and goes to do something praxic for the Panjandrums. We never see them again.”

  “They just vanish?”

  “We sing a certain anathem—a song of mourning and farewell—as we watch them walk out of the Mynster and get on a horse or climb into a helicopter or something, and, yes, ‘vanish’ is fair.”

  “What do the Ita have to do with that?”

  “Well, let’s say that the Saecular Power needs a disease cured. How can they possibly know which fraa or suur, out of all the concents, happens to be an expert in that disease?”

  She thought about this as we clambered up the spiral stair that wrapped up and around the Pinnacle. Each tread was a slab of rock cantilevered straight out from the side of the building: a daring design, and one that required some daring from anyone who would climb it, since there was no railing.

  “This all sounds pretty convenient for the Powers That Be,” Cord commented. “Has it ever occurred to you that all this fear about the Terrible Events and the Incanters is just a stick they keep handy to smack you with to make you do what they want?”

  “That is Saunt Patagar’s Assertion and it dates from the Twenty-ninth Century,” I told her.

  She snorted. “I’ll bite. What happened to Saunt Patagar?”

  “Actually, she flourished for a while, and founded her own Order. There might still be chapters of it somewhere.”

  “It’s frustrating, talking to you. Every idea my little mind can come up with has already been come up with by some Saunt two thousand years ago, and talked to death.”

  “I really don’t mean to be a smarty pants,” I said, “but that is Saunt Lora’s Proposition and it dates to the Sixteenth Century.”

  She laughed. “Really!”

  “Really.”

  “Literally two thousand years ago, a Saunt put forth the idea that—”

  “That every idea the human mind could come up with, had already been come up with by that time. It is a very influential idea…”

  “But wait a minute, wasn’t Saunt Lora’s idea a new idea?”

  “According to orthodox paleo-Lorites, it was the Last Idea.”

  “Ah. Well, then, I have to ask—”

  “What have we all been doing in here for the 2100 years since the Last Idea was come up with?”

  “Yeah. To be blunt about it.”

  “Not everyone agrees with this proposition. Everyone loves to hate the Lorites. Some call her a warmed-over Mystagogue, and worse. But Lorites are good to have around.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “Whenever anyone comes up with an idea that they think is new, the Lorites converge on it like jackals and try to prove that it’s actually 5000 years old or something. And more often than not, they’re right. It’s annoying and humiliating but at least it prevents people from wasting time rehashing old stuff. And the Lorites have to be excellent scholars in order to do what they do.”

  “So I take it you’re not a Lorite.”

  “No. If you like irony, you might enjoy knowing that, after Lora’s death, her own fid determined that her ideas had all been anticipated by a Peregrin philosopher 4000 years earlier.”

  “That’s funny—but doesn’t it prove Lora’s point? I’m trying to figure out what’s in it for you. Why do you stay?”

  “Ideas are good things to have even if they are old. Even to understand the most advanced theorics requires a lifetime of study. To keep the existing stock of ideas alive requires…all of this.” And I waved my arm around at the concent spread out below us.

  “So you’re like, I don’t know, a gardener. Tending a bunch of rare flowers. This is like your greenhouse. You have to keep the greenhouse up and running forever or the flowers will go extinct…but you never…”

 
“We rarely come up with new flowers,” I admitted. “But sometimes one will get hit with a cosmic ray. Which brings me to the subject of this stuff you see up here.”

  “Yeah. What is it? I’ve been looking at this poky thing my whole life and thinking it had a telescope on top, with a crinkly old fraa peering through it.”

  We’d reached the top of the “poky thing”—the Pinnacle. Its roof was a slab of stone about twice as wide as I was tall. There were a couple of odd-looking devices up here, but no telescopes.

  “The telescopes are down in those domes,” I said, “but you might not even recognize them as such.” I got ready to explain how the newmatter mirrors worked, using guidestar lasers to probe the atmosphere for density fluctuations, then changing their shape to cancel out the resulting distortions, gathering the light and bouncing it into a photomnemnonic tablet. But she was more interested in deciphering what was right in front of her. One was a quartz prism, bigger than my head, held in the grip of a muscular Saunt carved out of marble, and pointed south. Without any explanation from me, Cord saw how sunlight entering into one face of the prism was bounced downwards through a hole in the roof to shine on some metallic construct within. “This I’ve heard of,” she said, “it synchronizes the clock every day at noon, right?”

  “Unless it’s cloudy,” I said. “But even during a nuclear winter, when it can be cloudy for a hundred years, the clock doesn’t get too far out of whack.”

  “What’s this thing?” she asked, pointing to a dome of glass about the size of my fist, aimed straight up. It was mounted at the top of a pedestal of carven stone that rose to about the same height as the prism-holding statue. “It’s got to be some kind of a telescope, because I see the slot where you put in the photomnemonic tablet,” she said, and poked at an opening in the pedestal, just beneath the lens. “But this thing doesn’t look like it can move. How do you aim it?”

  “It can’t move, and we don’t have to aim it, because it’s a fisheye lens. It can see the entire sky. We call it Clesthyra’s Eye.”

  “Clesthyra—that’s the monster from ancient mythology that could look in all directions at once.”

  “Exactly.”

  “What’s the use of it? I thought the point of a telescope was to focus in on one thing. Not to look at everything.”

  “These things were installed in starhenges all over the world around the time of the Big Nugget, when people were very interested in asteroids. You’re right that they’re useless if you want to focus in on something. But they’re great for recording the track of a fast-moving object across the sky. Like the long streak of light that a meteorite draws. By recording all of those and measuring them, we can draw conclusions about what kinds of rocks are falling out of the sky—where they come from, what they’re made of, how big they are.”

  But as Clesthyra’s Eye lacked moving parts, it didn’t hold Cord’s attention. We’d gone as high as we could go, and reached the limit of her cosmographical curiosity. She drew out her pocket-watch on its rippling chain and checked the time, which I pointed out was funny because she was standing on top of a clock. She didn’t see the humor. I offered to show her how to read the time by checking the sun’s position with respect to the megaliths, but she said maybe some other time.

  We descended. She was feeling late, worrying about jobs to do and errands to run—the kinds of things that people extramuros spent their whole lives fretting about. It wasn’t until we reached the meadow, and the Decade Gate came in view, that she relaxed a little, and began reviewing in her mind all that we’d discussed.

  “So—what do you think of Saunt What’s-her-name’s Assertion?”

  “Patagar? That the legend of the Incanters is trumped up so that the Panjandrums can control us?”

  “Yeah. Patagar.”

  “Well, the problem with it is that the Saecular Power changes from age to age.”

  “Lately from year to year,” she said, but I couldn’t tell whether she was being serious.

  “So it’s awfully hard to see how they could maintain a consistent strategy over four millenia,” I pointed out. “From our point of view, it changes so often we don’t even bother keeping track, except around Apert. You could think of this place as a zoo for people who just got sick of paying attention to it.”

  I guess I sounded a little proud. A little defensive. I said goodbye to her on the threshold of the Decade Gate. We had agreed to meet again later in the week.

  As I walked back over the bridge, I thought that of all the people I’d talked to today, I was probably the least content in my situation. And yet when I heard the system being questioned by Jesry and by Cord, I lost no time defending it and explaining why it was a good thing. This seemed crazy on the face of it.

  * * *

  Newmatter: A solid, liquid, or gas having physical properties not found in naturally occurring elements or their compounds. These properties are traceable to the atomic nuclei. The process by which nuclei are assembled from smaller particles is called nucleosynthesis, and generally takes place inside of old stars. It is subject to physical laws that, in a manner of speaking, congealed into their current forms shortly after the inception of the cosmos. In the two centuries following the Reconstitution, these laws became sufficiently understood that it became possible for certain of the avout to carry out nucleosynthesis in their laboratories, and to do it according to sets of physical laws that differed slightly from those that are natural in this cosmos. Most newmatter proved to be of little practical value, but some variants were discovered and laboriously improved to produce substances that were unusually strong or supple or whose properties could be modulated under syntactical control. As part of the First Sack reforms, the avout were forbidden to carry out any further work on newmatter. Within the mathic world, it is still produced in small quantities to make bolts, chords, and spheres. Extramuros, it is used in a number of products.

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

  Fraa Lio perfected a new wrap that made him look like a parcel that had fallen from a mail train, but that could not under any circumstances be pulled over the face by a foe. We proved as much by trying to do it for a quarter of an hour, Lio getting more and more pleased with himself until Jesry ruined the mood by asking whether it could stop bullets.

  Cord came back, accompanied by one Rosk, a young man with whom she was having some sort of liaison. They had supper with us in the Refectory. She wore fewer wrenches and more jewelry, all of which she had made herself out of titanium.

  Arsibalt managed to walk to the basilica unmolested, but his father refused to talk to him, unless his purpose in coming was to repent and be consecrated into the orthodox Bazian faith.

  Lio roamed the fauxburbs in the hopes that he would be set upon by a gang of thugs, but instead people kept offering him rides and buying him drinks.

  Jesry’s family filtered back into town, and he went to visit them from time to time. I accompanied him once and was struck by their intelligence, their polish, and (as usual) how much stuff they owned. But there was nothing underneath. They knew many things but had no idea why. And strangely this made them more, rather than less, certain that they were right.

  Stung by Jesry’s earlier remarks, Lio persuaded some of his new friends to take him out to an abandoned quarry in the foothills where people amused themselves by discharging projectile weapons at things that didn’t move. His bolt and sphere became targets. Lio took up arms against two of his three possessions, assaulting them with bullets and broad-headed arrows. Bullets apparently passed through the weave of the bolt—the newmatter fibers stretched to let them go through, leaving gaps that could later be massaged away. But the razor-sharp arrows cut some of the fibers and left irreparable holes in the garment. The sphere, however, distorted and stretched without limit, like a sheet of caramel if you try to shove your finger through it. The bullets poked it nearly inside-out and knocked it back like a batted balloon. Lio’s verdict was that the sphere could be used as a
defense against gunfire: the bullet would still penetrate your body, but it would pull a long stretchy finger of sphere-stuff behind it, which would prevent fragmentation or tumbling, and which could be used to pull the bullet out of the wound. We were all much comforted by this.

  Cord came back for yet another visit, this time without Rosk. We had a nice stroll around the math and even went into the upper labyrinth for a look round. The conversation was first about where various members of our family had ended up, and later about where she hoped she’d be at the next Apert.

  Eight days into Apert, I was sick of it, and thoroughly mixed up. I had a crush on my sib. This might mean all kinds of bad things about me. As I thought about it more, though, I saw it was not the kind of crush where I wanted to have a liaison with her.

  I would think about her all day, care too much what she thought of me, and wish she would come around more often and pay attention to me. Then I’d remember that in a few days the gate would close and I wouldn’t have any contact with her for ten years. She seemed never to have lost sight of this, and had kept a certain distance. Anyway, I reckoned, the parts of the concent that were most interesting to her were those that concerned the Ita, and, in a sense, she had access to that all the time because she made stuff for them.

  On any given day of Apert I could have written an entire book about what I was thinking and feeling, and it would have been completely different from the previous day’s book. But by the end of the eighth day, the thing had been settled in such a way that I can sum it up much more briefly.

  * * *

  Liaison: (1) In Old and later Orth, an intimate (typically sexual) relationship among some number of fraas and suurs. The number is almost always two. The most common arrangement is for one of these to be a fraa and the other a suur of approximately the same age. Liaisons are of several types. Four types were mentioned by Ma Cartas in the Discipline. She forbade all of them. Later in the Old Mathic Age, a liaison between Saunt Per and Saunt Elith became famous when their hoards of love-letters were unearthed following their deaths. Shortly before the Rebirth, several maths took the unusual step of altering the Discipline to sanction the Perelithian liaison, meaning a permanent liaison between one fraa and one suur. The Revised Book of Discipline, adopted at the time of the Reconstitution, described eight types and sanctioned two. The Second New Revised Book of Discipline describes seventeen, sanctions four, and winks at two others. Each of the sanctioned liaisons is subject to certain rules, and is solemnized by an aut in which the participants agree, in the presence of at least three witnesses, to abide by those rules. Orders or concents that deviate from the Discipline by sanctioning other types of liaisons are subject to disciplinary action by the Inquisition. It is permissible, however, for an order or concent to sanction fewer types; those that sanction zero types are, of course, nominally celibate. (2) A Late Praxic Age bulshytt term, as such, impossible to define clearly, but apparently having something to do with contacts or relations between entities.