Anathem

  “Do you want to talk to Orolo?” was Fraa Haligastreme’s question, after I broke the news to him. He wasn’t surprised. He wasn’t overjoyed. He wasn’t anything except tired. Just looking at his face in the candlelight of the Old Chapterhouse told me how exhausting the last few weeks had been for him.

  I considered it. Talking to Orolo seemed like such an obvious thing to do, and yet I’d made no move to do it. Considering how the conversation had gone with Tulia, I was no longer inclined to stay up half the night telling people about my feelings.

  “Where is he?”

  “I believe he is in the meadow with Jesry conducting naked-eye observations.”

  “Then I don’t think I’ll disturb them,” I said.

  Haligastreme seemed to draw energy from my words. The fid is beginning to act his age. “Tulia seems to think that he wants me…here,” I said, and looked around the Old Chapterhouse: just a wide spot in the Cloister gallery, rarely used except for ceremonial purposes—but still the heart of the worldwide Order, where Saunt Edhar himself had once paced to and fro developing his theorics.

  “Tulia is correct,” Haligastreme said.

  “Then here is where I want to be, even if the welcome is lukewarm.”

  “If it seems that way to you, it’s largely out of concern for your own well-being,” he said.

  “I’m not sure I believe that.”

  “All right,” he said, a bit irritated, “maybe some don’t want you for other reasons. You used the word lukewarm, not chilly or hostile. I refer now only to those who are lukewarm.”

  “Are you one of those?”

  “Yes. We, the lukewarm, are only concerned—”

  “That I won’t be able to keep up.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Well, even if that’s how it works out, you can always come to me if you need to know some digits of pi.”

  Haligastreme did me the courtesy of chuckling.

  “Look,” I said, “I know you’re worried about this. I’ll make it work. I owe that much to Arsibalt and Lio and Tulia.”

  “How so?”

  “They’ve sacrificed something to make the concent work better in the future. Maybe with the result that the next generation of hierarchs will be better than what we have now—and will leave the Edharians to work in peace.”

  “Unless,” said Fraa Haligastreme, “being hierarchs changes them.”

  Part 4

  ANATHEM

  Six weeks after I joined the Edharian order, I became hopelessly stuck on a problem that one of Orolo’s knee-huggers had set for me as a way of letting me know that I didn’t really understand what it meant for two hypersurfaces to be tangent. I went out for a stroll. Without really thinking about it I crossed the frozen river and wandered into the stand of page trees that grew on the rise between the Decade Gate and the Century Gate.

  Despite the best efforts of the sequencers who had brought these trees into being, only one leaf in ten was high-grade page material, suitable for a typical quarto-sized book. The most common flaw was smallness or irregularity, such that when placed in the cutting-frame, it would not make a rectangle. That was the case for about four out of ten leaves—more during cold or dry years, fewer if the growing season had been favorable. Holes gnawed by insects, or thick veins that made it difficult to write on the underside, might render a leaf unusable save as compost. These flaws were especially common in leaves that grew near the ground. The best yield was to be found in the middle branches, not too far out from the trunk. The arbortects had given them stout boughs in the midsection, easy for young ones to clamber on. Every autumn when I’d been a fid, I’d spent a week up on those branches, picking the best leaves and skimming them down to older avout who stacked them in baskets. Later in the day we’d tie them by their stems to lines stretched from tree to tree, and let them dry as the weather turned colder. After the first killing frost we would bring them indoors, stack them, and pile on tons of flat rocks. It took about a century for them to age properly. So once we’d gotten the current year’s crop under stone we’d go back and find similar piles that had been made about a hundred years earlier, and, if they seemed ready, take the rocks off and peel the leaves apart. The good ones we stacked in the cutting-frames and made into blank pages for distribution to the concent or for binding into books.

  I’d rarely gone into the coppice after harvest time. To walk through it in this season was to be reminded that we only collected a small fraction of its leaves. The rest curled up and fell off. All those blank pages made an uproar as I sloshed through them, searching for one especially grand tree I’d always loved to climb. My memory played me false and I wandered lost for a few minutes. When I finally found it, I couldn’t resist climbing up to its lower boughs. When I’d done this as a boy I’d imagined myself deep in the middle of a vast forest, which was much more romantic than being walled up in a math surrounded by casinos and tire stores. But now, with the branches bare, it was plain that I was close to the eastern limit of the coppice. The ivy-snarled ruin of Shuf’s Dowment was in plain sight. I felt foolish, thinking Arsibalt must have seen me from a window, so I let myself to the ground and began walking that way. Arsibalt now spent most of his days there. He had been pestering me to come out and visit him, and I’d been making excuses. I couldn’t slink away now.

  I had to get over a low hedge that bounded the coppice. Shoving the snarled foliage out of my way I felt cold stone against my hand, pain an instant later. This was actually a stone wall that had become a trellis for whatever would grow on it. I vaulted over it and spent some time yanking my bolt and chord free from hedge-plants. I was standing on someone’s tangle, brown and shriveled now. The black earth was gouged where people had been digging up the last potatoes of the season. Going over the wall made me feel as though I were trespassing. To elicit such feelings was probably why Shuf’s Lineage had put it there in the first place. And that explained why those who’d found themselves on the wrong side of that wall had eventually become fed up with it and broken the lineage. Tearing the wall down was too much trouble and so that work had been left to ants and ivy. The Reformed Old Faanians had more recently got in the habit of using this place as a retreat, and when no one had objected, they’d slowly begun to make themselves more comfortable there.

  * * *

  Gardan’s Steelyard: A rule of thumb attributed to Fraa Gardan (-1110 to-1063), stating that, when one is comparing two hypotheses, they should be placed on the arms of a metaphorical steelyard (a kind of primitive scale, consisting of an arm free to pivot around a central fulcrum) and preference given to the one that “rises higher,” presumably because it weighs less; the upshot being that simpler, more “lightweight” hypotheses are preferable to those that are “heavier,” i.e., more complex. Also referred to as Saunt Gardan’s Steelyard or simply the Steelyard.

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

  Very comfortable, as I saw when I came up the steps and pushed the door open (again fighting the sense that I was a trespasser). ROF carpenters had been at work furnishing the stone shell with wooden floors and paneled walls. Actually “cabinet-makers” was a fairer description than “carpenters” for avout who chose woodworking as their avocation, and so the place was all fitted and joined to tolerances that Cord might have envied. It was mostly one great cubical room, ten paces square, and lined with books. To my right a fire burned on a hearth, to my left, clear northern sky-light rushed in through a bay window so large that it formed a sort of alcove, as broad, round, and comfortable as Arsibalt, who sat in the middle of it reading a book so ancient he had to handle the pages with tongs. So he had not seen me tree-climbing after all. I could have slunk away. But now I was glad I hadn’t. It was good to see him here.

  “You could be Shuf himself,” I said.

  “Ssh,” he commanded, and looked about the place. “People will be cross if you talk that way. Oh, all the orders have their special hideaways. Islands of luxury that must make Saunt Cartas roll
over in her chalcedony sarcophagus.”

  “Pretty luxurious, that, come to think of it—”

  “Come off it, it’s cold as hell in the winter.”

  “Hence the expression ‘cold as Cartas’s—’”

  “Ssh,” he said again.

  “You know, Arsibalt, if the Edharian chapter has a luxurious hideaway, they’ve yet to show it to me.”

  “They are the odd ones out,” he said, rolling his eyes. He looked me up and down. “Perhaps when you have attained more seniority—”

  “Well, what are you, at the age of nineteen? The FAE of the Reformed Old Faanians?”

  “The chapter and I have become most comfortable with each other in, yes, a short time. They support my project.”

  “What—reconciling us with the Deolaters?”

  “Some of the Reformed Old Faanians even believe in God.”

  “Do you, Arsibalt? All right, all right,” I added, for he was getting ready to shush me for a third time. He finally began to move. He took me on a little tour, showing me some of the artifacts of the Dowment’s halcyon days: gold drinking-cups and jeweled book-covers now preserved under glass. I accused his order of having more of the same hidden away somewhere for drinking out of, and he blushed.

  Then, as all this discussion of utensils had put him in mind of food, he shelved his book. We left Shuf’s Dowment behind us and began walking back for the midday meal. We had both skipped Provener, a luxury that was possible only because some younger fraas had begun to spell us winding the clock a few days a week.

  When we gave up altogether on clock-winding, which would happen in two or three years, each of us would have enough free time to settle on an avocation—something practical that one could do to help improve life at the concent. Between now and then, we had the luxury of trying different things just to see how we liked them.

  Fraa Orolo, for example, and his ongoing conversation with the library grape. We were too far north. The grapes were not happy. But we did have a south-facing slope, between the page trees and the outer wall of the concent, where they deigned to grow.

  “Beekeeping,” Arsibalt said when I asked him what he was interested in.

  I laughed at the image of Arsibalt enveloped in a cloud of bees. “I always thought you’d end up doing indoor work,” I said, “on dead things. I thought you’d be a bookbinder.”

  “At this time of year, beekeeping is indoor work on dead things,” he pointed out. “Perhaps when the bees come out of hibernation I won’t favor it so much. How about you, Fraa Erasmas?”

  Though Arsibalt didn’t know it, this was a sensitive subject. There was another reason you needed an avocation: so that if you turned out to be incapable of doing anything else, you could give up on books and chalk halls and dialog and work as a sort of laborer for the rest of your life. It was called “falling back.” There were plenty of avout like that, making food, brewing beer, and carving stone, and it was no secret who they were.

  “You can pick some funny thing like beekeeping,” I pointed out, “and it’ll never be anything more than an eccentric hobby—because you’ll never need to fall back. Not unless the ROF suddenly recruits a whole lot of geniuses. For me the odds of falling back are a little greater and I need to pick something I could actually do for eighty years without going crazy.”

  Arsibalt now blew an opportunity to assure me that I was really smart and that this would never happen. I didn’t mind. After my rough conversation with Tulia six weeks ago I was spending less time agonizing and more time trying to get things accomplished. “There are some opportunities,” I told him, “making the instruments on the starhenge work the way they’re supposed to.”

  “Those opportunities would be much brighter if you in fact had access to the starhenge,” he pointed out. It was safe for him to talk this way since we were sloshing through leaves and no one was near us, unless Suur Trestanas was hiding in a leaf pile with a hand cupped to her ear.

  I stopped and raised my chin.

  “Are you expecting an Inquisitor to fall out of a tree?” Arsibalt asked me.

  “No, just looking at it,” I said, referring to the starhenge. From here, on this little rise, we had a good view of it. But nestled as we were in the coppice, we’d be difficult to make out from the Mynster and so I felt comfortable taking a long look. The twin telescopes of Saunts Mithra and Mylax were in the same position where they had rested during the three months or so we’d been locked out: slewed around to aim at the northern sky.

  “I was thinking that if Orolo was using the M & M to look at something they didn’t want him to see, then we might get some clues from where he pointed it the last day he had access to it. Maybe he even took some pictures that night, yet to be seen.”

  “Can you draw any conclusions from where the M & M is pointed now?” Arsibalt asked.

  “Only that Orolo wanted to look at something above the pole.”

  “And what is above the pole? Other than the pole star?”

  “That’s just it,” I said. “Nothing.”

  “What do you mean? There must be something.”

  “But it messes up my hypothesis.”

  “What, pray tell, is that? And can you explain it as we walk toward a place that is warm and has food?”

  I started moving my feet again, and talked to the back of Arsibalt’s head as I let him break trail through the leaves. “I had been guessing it was a rock.”

  “Meaning an asteroid,” he said.

  “Yeah. But rocks don’t come over the pole.”

  “How can you say such a thing? Don’t they come from all directions?”

  “Yeah, but they mostly have low inclinations—they are in the same plane as the planets. So you’d look near the ecliptic, which is what we call that plane.”

  “But that is a statistical argument,” he pointed out. “It could simply be an unusual rock.”

  “It fails the Steelyard.”

  “Saunt Gardan’s Steelyard is a useful guideline. All sorts of real things fail it,” Arsibalt pointed out, “including you and me.”

  Orolo sat with us. It was the first time I’d talked to him in ages. He sat where he could gaze out a window at the mountains, in much the same mood as I’d been looking at the starhenge a few minutes earlier. It was a clear day, and the peaks were all standing out, seeming as if they were close enough to throw stones at. “I wonder what the seeing will be like tonight on top of Bly’s Butte,” he sighed. “Better than here, anyway!”

  “Is that the one where the slines ate Saunt Bly’s liver?” I asked.

  “The same.”

  “Is that around here? I thought it was on another continent or something.”

  “Oh no. Bly was a Saunt Edhar man! You can look it up in the Chronicle—we have all of his relics salted away somewhere.”

  “Do you really mean to suggest that there’s an observatory there? Or are you just pulling my leg?”

  Orolo shrugged. “I’ve no idea. Estemard built a telescope there, after he renounced his vow and stormed out the Day Gate.”

  “And Estemard is—”

  “One of my two teachers.”

  “Paphlagon being the other?”

  “Yes. They both got fed up with this place at about the same time. Estemard left, Paphlagon went into the upper labyrinth one night after supper and then I didn’t see him for a quarter of a century, until—well—you know.” A thought occurred to him. “What were you doing during Paphlagon’s Evocation? At the time, you were still a guest of Autipete.”

  Autipete was a figure of ancient mythology who had crept up on her father as he lay sleeping and put out his eyes. I had never heard Suur Trestanas referred to this way. I bit my lip and shook my head in dismay as Arsibalt blew soup out his nostrils. “That is not fair,” I said, “she’s only following orders.”

  Orolo squared off to plane me. “You know, during the Third Harbinger it was quite common for those who had committed terrible crimes to say—”

 
“That they were just following orders, we all know that.”

  “Fraa Erasmas is suffering from Saunt Alvar’s Syndrome,” Arsibalt said.

  “Those people during the Third Harbinger were shoving children into furnaces with bulldozers,” I said. “And as far as Saunt Alvar goes—well, he was the sole survivor of his concent in the Third Sack and was held captive for three decades. Locking the door to the telescopes for a few weeks doesn’t really measure up, does it?”

  Orolo conceded the point with a wink. “My question stands. What did you do during Voco?”

  Of course I’d have loved to tell him. So I did—but I made it into a joke. “While no one was looking, I ran up to the starhenge to make observations. Unfortunately, the sun was out.”

  “That damned luminous orb!” Orolo spat. Then something crossed his mind. “But you know that our equipment can see some things during the daytime, if they are very bright.”

  Since Orolo had decided to play along with my joke, it would not have been sporting for me to drop it at this point. “Unfortunately the M & M was pointed in the wrong direction,” I said. “I didn’t have time to slew it around.”

  “The wrong direction for what?” Orolo asked.

  “For looking at anything bright—such as a planet or…” I faltered.

  Jesry sat down at an empty table nearby, facing me and Orolo, and remained still, ignoring his food. If he’d been a wolf his ears would have been erect and swiveled toward us.

  Orolo said, “Would it be too much trouble for you to bring your sentence to a decent conclusion?”