Anathem Read online

  “All right,” Quin finally said, “I never thought of it like this, but now that you mention it, we have three systems…”

  “The chaps in the purple boxes, the spine clamps, and this new thing that neither I nor Fraa Erasmas has ever heard of called the Warden of Heaven,” said Fraa Orolo, and began pushing through many leaves of his questionnaire—digging deep.

  Something had occurred to Artisan Quin. “I never mentioned them because I thought you’d know all about them!”

  “Because,” Fraa Orolo said, finding the page he’d been looking for, and scanning it, “they claimed that they came from the concent…bringing the enlightenment of the mathic world to a worthy few.”

  “Yeah. Didn’t they?”

  “No. They didn’t.” Seeing just how taken aback Quin was, Orolo continued: “This sort of thing happens every few hundred years. Some charlatan will appear and make a claim on Saecular Power based on an association with the mathic world—which happens to be fraudulent.”

  I knew the answer to the following question before I blurted it out: “Does Artisan Flec—is he a follower, a disciple, of the Warden of Heaven?”

  Quin and Orolo both looked at me, agog for different reasons. “Yes,” Quin said. “He listens to their casts while he works.”

  “That’s why he made a speely of Provener,” I said. “Because this Warden of Heaven claims to be part of us. If there’s anything mysterious or…well, magnificent about this place, why, that just makes the Warden of Heaven seem that much bigger and more powerful. And to the extent that Artisan Flec is a disciple of the Warden of Heaven, he feels some of that belongs to him.”

  Orolo said nothing, which made me embarrassed at the time. When I thought about it later, though, I understood that he didn’t need to say anything because what I’d said was obviously true.

  Quin was looking a little confused. “Flec didn’t make a speely.”

  “I beg your pardon?” I said.

  Fraa Orolo was still distracted, thinking about the Warden of Heaven.

  “They wouldn’t allow it. His speelycaptor was too good,” Quin explained.

  Being old and wise, Fraa Orolo went rigid, pursed his lips, and looked uneasy. Being neither, I said: “What on earth does that mean?”

  Fraa Orolo’s hand came down on my wrist and prevented me from writing any more. And I suspect that his other hand wanted to clamp down on Quin’s mouth. Quin went on, “The Eagle-Rez, the SteadiHand, the DynaZoom—put those all together, and it could have seen straight across into the other parts of your Mynster, even through the screens. Or at least that’s what he was told by the—”

  “Artisan Quin!” Fraa Orolo trumpeted, loud enough to draw looks from everyone else in the library. Then he made his voice quite low: “I am afraid you are about to tell us something that your friend Flec learned from talking to the Ita. And I must remind you that such a thing is not allowed under our Discipline.”

  “Sorry,” Quin said. “It’s confusing.”

  “I know it is.”

  “All right. Forget about the speelycaptor. I’m sorry. Where were we?”

  “We were talking about the Warden of Heaven,” Fraa Orolo said, relaxing a little, and finally letting go my wrist. “And as far as I’m concerned, the only thing we need to establish is whether he is a Throwback-turned-Mystagogue, or a Bottle Shaker, as the former can be quite dangerous.”

  * * *

  Kefedokhles: (1) A fid from the Halls of Orithena who survived the eruption of Ecba to become one of the Forty Lesser Peregrins. In his old age, he appears to have turned up on the Periklyne, though some scholars believe that this must have been a son or namesake of the Orithenan. He appears as a minor character in several of the great dialogs, most notably Uraloabus, where his timely and long-winded interruption enables Thelenes—who has been thrown back on his heels by the heavy sarcasm of his adversary—to recover his equilibrium, change the subject, and embark upon the systematic annihilation of Sphenic thought that accounts for the last third of the dialog and culminates in the title character’s public suicide. From the Peregrin phase of Kefedokhles’s career, three dialogs survive, and from his years on the Periklyne, eight. Though talented, he gives the impression of being insufferably smug and pedantic, whence sense 2. (2) An insufferably smug or pedantic interlocutor.

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

  “I can puzzle out ‘Throwback-turned-Mystagogue,’” I told Fraa Orolo later. I was chopping carrots in the Refectory kitchen, and he was eating them. “And I can even guess why they are dangerous: because they’re angry, they want to come back to the place that Anathematized them, and even the score.”

  “Yes, and that’s why Quin and I spent the whole afternoon with the Warden Fendant.”

  “But what’s a Bottle Shaker?”

  “Imagine a witch doctor in a society that doesn’t know how to make glass. A bottle washes up on the shore. It has amazing properties. He puts it on a stick and waves it around and convinces his fellows that he has got some of those amazing properties himself.”

  “So Bottle Shakers aren’t dangerous?”

  “No. Too easily impressed.”

  “What of the slines who ate Saunt Bly’s liver? Apparently they weren’t so impressed.”

  To hide a smile, Fraa Orolo pretended to inspect a potato. “The point is well taken, but remember that Saunt Bly was living alone on a butte. The very fact of his having been Thrown Back separated him from the artifacts and auts that are most impressive to Bottle Shaker–producing societies.”

  “So what did you and the Warden Fendant decide?”

  Fraa Orolo glanced around in a way that made it obvious I should have been more discreet.

  “Expect more precautions at Apert.”

  I lowered my voice. “So, the Saecular Power will send…I don’t know…?”

  “Robots with stun guns? Echelons of horse archers? Cylinders of sleeping gas?”

  “I guess so.”

  “That depends on to what extent the Warden of Heaven has become the same as the Panjandrums,” Fraa Orolo said. He liked to call the Saecular Power the Panjandrums. “And that is very difficult for us to make out. Obviously, I can’t make heads or tails of it. It is just the kind of thing for which the office of Warden Fendant was created, and I’m certain that Fraa Delrakhones is working the problem as we speak.”

  “Could it lead to…you know…”

  “A Sack? Local or general? I certainly don’t think that this is going to culminate in Number Four. Fraa Delrakhones would have heard rumblings from other Wardens Fendant. Even a local sack is most improbable. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a bit of roughhousing on Tenth Night; but that’s why we prepare for Apert by moving all of the stuff we really care about to the labyrinths.”

  “You said to Quin that radical changes extramuros had twice culminated in Sacks,” I reminded him.

  Fraa Orolo let a moment go by and said, “Yes?” Then, before I could go on, he put on the merry-fraa face that he used when he was trying to humor a chalk hall full of bored fids. “You’re not actually worrying about Number Four, are you?”

  I murdered a carrot and said Diax’s Rake three times under my breath.

  “Three Sacks-General in 3700 years is not bad,” he pointed out. “The statistics for the Saecular world are far more alarming.”

  “I was worrying about it a little bit,” I said. “But that is not what I was going to ask before you went Kefedokhles on me.”

  Orolo said nothing, perhaps because I was gripping a large knife. I was tired and testy. Earlier, I had punched in my sphere to make it a bushel basket and ventured into the tangles nearest the Cloister, only to find they’d already been stripped of produce. To find all the stuff we needed to make the stew, I’d had to cross the river and ransack some of the tangles between it and the wall.

  I snatched a hard-earned carrot and aimed it at the sky. “You have only taught me of the stars,” I said. “History I have learned from ot
hers—mostly from Fraa Corlandin.”

  “He probably told you that the Sacks were our fault,” said Orolo—using our, I noted, in a very elastic way, to mean every avout all the way back to Ma Cartas.

  Sometimes, when I was chatting with Thistlehead, he would reach out and give me a little push on the collarbone, and just like that I’d be flailing my arms, aware that one more push would topple me. It was Lio’s charming way of letting me know that he had noticed I was standing in the wrong way, according to his books of Vale-lore. I thought it nonsense. But my body always seemed to agree with Fraa Lio, because it would over-react. Once, in trying to recover my balance, I had pulled a muscle deep in my back that had hurt for three weeks.

  Fraa Orolo’s last sentence touched my mind in a similar way. And in a similar way, I over-reacted. My face flushed and my heart beat faster. It was just like the moment in a dialog when Thelenes has tricked his interlocutor into saying something stupid and is about to begin slicing him up like a carrot on a plank.

  “Each Sack was followed by a reform, was it not?” I said.

  “Let us Rake your sentence, and say that each Sack led to changes in the maths that are still observed to this day.”

  That Fraa Orolo was now talking in this style confirmed that we were in dialog. The other fraas stopped peeling potatoes and chopping herbs, and gathered around to watch me get planed.

  “All right, call them whatever you wish,” I said, and then snorted, because I knew I had left myself open; this was the equivalent of me falling on my arse after one little nudge from Fraa Lio. I should never have brought up Kefedokhles. I was going to pay for that.

  I couldn’t stop myself from shooting a glance out the window. The kitchen faced south into an herb garden that filled most of the space between it and the closest of the tangles—the ones cultivated by the very oldest fraas and suurs, so that they wouldn’t have to walk very far to get their chores done. The roof on that side had a deep overhanging eave to prevent sun from shining in and making the kitchen even hotter than it already was. Suur Tulia and Suur Ala were sitting together in the shade of that eave, directly beneath the window, cutting up tires to make sandals. I didn’t want Tulia to hear me get planed because I had a crush on her, and I didn’t want Ala to hear it because she would enjoy it so much. Fortunately, they were explaining something to each other as usual, and had no idea what was happening in here.

  “Call them whatever you wish? What a curious thing to say, Fid Erasmas,” Orolo said. “Let me see…may I call them carrots or floor-tiles?” Titters flew out from all around, like sparrows flushed from a belfry.

  “No, Pa Orolo, it would not make sense to say that each Sack was followed by a carrot.”

  “Why not, Fid Erasmas?”

  “Because the word carrot has a meaning different from reform or change in the maths.”

  “So because words have this remarkable property of possessing specific meanings, we must take care to use the correct ones? Is that a just statement of what you have said, or am I in error?”

  “It is correct, Pa Orolo.”

  “Perhaps some of the others, who have learned so much from the New Circle and the Reformed Old Faanians, have noted some error in this, and would like to correct us.” And, with the placid eye of a viper tasting the air, Fraa Orolo looked about at the half-dozen fids who had encircled us.

  No one moved.

  “Very well, no one here wishes to support the novel hypothesis of Saunt Proc. We may continue under the assumption that words mean things. What is the difference between saying that the Sacks were followed by reforms, and saying that they were followed by changes in the maths?”

  “I suppose it has to do with the connotations of the word reform,” I said. For I had given up and was willing to let myself be planed, not because I liked it but because it was so unusual for Fraa Orolo to expose his views about anything other than stars and planets.

  “Ah, perhaps you could elaborate on that, for I am not gifted with your faculty for words, Fid Erasmas, and would be chagrined if I failed to follow your argument.”

  “Very well, Pa Orolo. To say that there were changes seems like a more Diaxan phrasing—raked clean of subjective emotional judgments—whereas, when we say reforms, it gives the feeling that something was wrong with how the maths were run before, and that—”

  “We deserved to be sacked? The Panjandrums needed to come in and mend us?”

  “When you put it that way, Pa Orolo, and in that tone of voice, you seem to suggest that the changes that were made, need not have been—that they were forced on us wrongly by the Saecular Power.” I stumbled over a few words, because I was excited. I had glimpsed a way to corner Orolo. For those reforms—those changes—were as fundamental to the maths as going to Provener every day, and he could hardly take a stand against them.

  But Fraa Orolo only shook his head sadly, as if he could scarcely believe what thin gruel was being spooned out to us in the chalk halls. “You need to review the Saeculum of Saunt Cartas.”

  Avout who spent a lot of time peering through telescopes were known for taking an eccentric approach to the study of history, and so I did not laugh at this. A few of the others exchanged smirks.

  “Pa Orolo, I read it last year.”

  “What you read was probably selections from a translation into Middle Orth. Many of those translations were influenced by a sort of ur-Procian mentality that took hold during the Old Mathic Age, not long before the rise of the Mystagogues. You giggle, but it is obvious once you begin to notice it. Certain bits of it they translate poorly, because they are skittish about what it means; then, when they get around to choosing selections, they leave those bits out because they’re ashamed of them. Instead you should go to the effort of reading Cartas in the original. It is not as difficult to follow Old Orth as some would have you believe.”

  “And when I do this, what shall I learn?”

  “That in the very founding document of the mathic world, Saunt Cartas herself emphasizes that it is not an accommodation to the Saeculum but a kind of opposition to it. A counterbalance.”

  “The Concent-as-fortress mentality?” suggested one of the listeners—trying to bait Orolo.

  “That is not a designation I love,” said Orolo, “but if I hold forth on that, the stew will never get made, and we’ll soon have two hundred and ninety-five hungry avout calling for our heads. Suffice it to say, Fid Erasmas, that Saunt Cartas would never have accepted the notion that the Saecular Power can or should ‘reform’ the maths. But she would have admitted that it does have the power to wreak changes on us.”

  * * *

  Proc: A late Praxic Age metatheorician who is assumed to have been liquidated in the Terrible Events. During the brief window of stability between the Second and Third Harbingers, Proc was the leading figure in a like-minded group called the Circle, which claimed that symbols have no meaning at all, and that all discourse that pretends to mean anything is nothing more than a game played with syntax, or the rules for putting symbols together. Following the Reconstitution, he was made patron Saunt of the Syntactic Faculty of the Concent of Saunt Muncoster. As such, he is viewed as the progenitor of all orders that trace their descent to that Faculty, as opposed to those originating from the Semantic Faculty, whose patron was Saunt Halikaarn.

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

  “I understand that some planning took place in the kitchen?”

  “Believe me, it was not one for ink or even chalk.”

  Fraa Corlandin, the FAE—First Among Equals—of the Order of the New Circle, had sat down across the table from me.

  For the first nine and three-quarters years of my time at the Concent, he had ignored me, except in chalk hall where he was obliged to pay attention; lately he was acting as if we were friends. This was to be expected. With luck, thirty or forty new avout would be joining us at Apert. Even though they were not here yet, they seemed to surround us like ghosts, which made me seem older by contrast.


  Not long after, if things went according to the usual pattern, the bells would signal the aut of Eliger, and all the Tenners would come together to watch me take a vow that would bind me to one order or another.

  Eleven of my crop had been Collected—brought straight into the math from extramuros. The other twenty-one had joined the Unarian math first and spent at least a year under their Discipline before graduating to the Tenners; they tended to be a little bit older than us Collects. All Collection, and most graduation, happened during Apert. Though if a One-off showed exceptional promise, he or she could graduate early by passing through the labyrinth that connected the Unarian to the Decenarian math. But this had only happened three times while I’d been here. The full wiring diagram of how avout came here from extramuros and from small feeder maths in the region, and how they moved from one math to another, was complicated, and not really worth explaining. The upshot was that in order to maintain our nominal strength of three hundred, we Tenners would need to take in about forty new people at Apert. Some—we couldn’t know how many—would be graduating from the Unarian math. The balance would be made up by Collection, and by trolling through hospitals and shelters for abandoned newborns.

  Once that was all done, I’d be facing a choice. Fraa Corlandin was sounding me out, perhaps even recruiting me, for the New Circle.

  I had always been seen as a fid of Orolo and a few other Edharians who assisted him in his theorics. They spent whole days together in tiny chalk halls, and when they came out, I would go in and see their handwriting all tangled together on the slates—snarled skeins of equations and diagrams of which I understood perhaps one symbol in twenty. At this very moment, I was supposed to be working on a problem that Orolo had set for me: a photomnemonic tablet bearing an image of Saunt Tancred’s Nebula, from which I was supposed to answer certain questions about the formation of heavy nuclei in the cores of stars. Definitely not a New Circle kind of exercise. So why would the New Circle take it into their heads, now, that I might choose them at Eliger?