Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

Dense though I am, I finally put it together that this was the last time that our crop of thirty-two fids would be gathered together, as such, in our lives. The girls with their preternatural ability for noticing such things were responding, the boys with our equally uncanny obtuseness were only affected inasmuch as the girls we fancied were crying.

Sline: (1) In Fluccish of the late Praxic Age and early Reconstitution, a slang word formed by truncation of baseline, which is a Praxic commercial bulshytt term.

“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.

Arsibalt had been doing a lot of brooding, and he had been doing it in conspicuous places, as much as demanding that we ask him what was wrong. I’d refused to do so because I found it such an annoying tactic.

Diax said something that is still very important to us, which is that you should not believe a thing only because you like to believe it. We call that ‘Diax’s Rake’ and sometimes we repeat it to ourselves as a reminder not to let subjective emotions cloud our judgment.”

That was unnerving. But I could do nothing about it. Feeling embarrassed by a mistake I’d made months ago was a waste of time.

“You know about atom smashers? Particle accelerators?” “Sure,” I said. “Praxic Age installations. Huge and expensive. Used to test theories about elementary particles and forces.” “Yes,” Arsibalt said. “If you can’t test it, it’s not theorics—it’s metatheorics. A branch of philosophy. So, if you want to think of it this way, our test equipment is what defines the boundary separating theorics from philosophy.”

“The idea that our cosmos is not the only one.” “Yes. And that’s what Paphlagon writes about when he isn’t studying this cosmos.” “Now I’m a little confused,” I said, “because I thought you told me just a minute ago that he was working on the HTW.” “Well, but you could think of Protism—the belief that there is another realm of existence populated by pure theorical forms—as the earliest and simplest polycosmic theory,” he pointed out. “Because it posits two cosmi,” I said, trying to keep up, “one for us, and one for isosceles triangles.” “Yes.”

I rummaged in his shopping bag and found a pair of drawers, which I handed to him. “Do I need to explain this?” I asked, pointing out the fly. Fraa Jad took the garment from me and discovered how the fly worked. “Topology is destiny,” he said, and put the drawers on.

“Let’s buy a sextant, then,” suggested Fraa Jad. “Those have not been made in four thousand years,” I told him. “Let’s build one then.” “I have no idea of all the parts and whatnot that go into a sextant.” He found this amusing. “Neither do I. I was assuming we would design it from first principles.” “Yeah!” snorted Barb. “It’s just geometry, Raz!”

Crade and his passenger now hated me forever but at least this was over. This plan, however, necessitated a shake-up that put me and Sammann in Ferman Beller’s vehicle with Arsibalt. The three of us would navigate. Lio and a Hundreder moved to Cord’s fetch to balance the load; they would follow. Ganelial Crade sprayed us with loose rocks as he gunned his fetch out into the open. “That man behaves so much like the villain in a work of literature, it’s almost funny,” Arsibalt observed. “Yes,” said one of the Hundreders, “it’s as if he’d never heard of foreshadowing.”

Lio put his bag down, stood up straighter than I could, and rotated his shoulders down and back, which was a way of recovering his equilibrium. As if he could defeat opponents just through superior posture.

Another scream emanated from the edge of the crowd. This one was altogether different. It came from a person who was experiencing an amount of pain that was incredible, in the literal sense; his scream sounded surprised, as in I had no idea anything could be as painful as whatever is happening to me now!

We assumed that, inside of the icosahedron, some part of it rotated to create pseudo-gravity. So it was a huge gyroscope. When it maneuvered—as it had been forced to, last night—gyroscopic forces must be induced between the spun and despun sections, and those must be managed by bearings of some description. How great were those forces? And how did the thing maneuver, anyway? No jets—no rocket thrusters—had fired. No propulsion charges had detonated. And yet the Hedron had spun around with remarkable adroitness. The only reasonable explanation was that it contained a set of momentum wheels—rapidly spinning gyroscopes—that could be used to store and release angular momentum.

To me this sounded like the kind of organizational bulshytt that was always being spouted by pompous extras who hadn’t bothered to define their terms.

Fraa Osa stepped forward, giving Lio an if I may? look. We hadn’t heard much out of the Vale leader, so everyone got where they could see him. “The greatest difficulty for ones such as you shall be, not completion of the given tasks, but instead the humiliation and uncertainty that arise from not being able to know the entire plan. These emotions can hamper you. You must simply decide, now, either to proceed with the awareness that the entire plan might never be revealed to you—and, were it revealed, might have obvious defects—or to turn away and allow some other person to occupy the space suit that has been allotted to you.” And then he stepped back. There was a minute of silence as all of us made our decisions. If that was the right word for what was going on in our heads. I didn’t feel any of the emotions connected with real decision-making. To step away from this group at the moment was simply unthinkable. There was no decision to be made. Fraa Osa, who had devoted his entire life to preparing for such situations, no doubt knew this perfectly well. He wasn’t really asking us to make a decision. He was telling us, in a reasonably diplomatic way, to shut up and concentrate on the matter at hand.

But I knew the velocity-versus-time curve of this trajectory by heart, and knew I was still far from reaching orbital velocity. Most of the velocity gain was going to happen in the final part of the burn, when the monyafeek had left in its wake three-quarters or more of its mass in the form of expended propellants. The same thrust, pushing against a greatly reduced burden, would then yield acceleration that Lio had cheerfully described as “near-fatal.” “But it’s okay,” he’d said, “you’ll black out before anything really bad happens to you.”

I looked around to see two other monyafeeks converging on us. They were flying in improbably close formation. Actually, one of them—Esma—was towing the other. “I grappled Jules. He was drifting,” Esma said. Fortunately, I had grown accustomed to the Valers’ habit of modest understatement. I’d only just managed to get here alone. In the same time, Esma had tracked someone else, maneuvered to snag him, and brought him home.

Arsibalt snap-linked himself to the control panel of the nuke and spent a lot of time motionless, which probably meant he was reading the instructions on the virtual screen inside his face-mask and going through checklists. After a while he got to work deploying some long poles that ended up sticking out from one side of the nuke like spines. Petals blossomed from near their ends, blocking our view of whatever was on the tips of those poles. Arsibalt returned to the control panel and worked for a few moments, then informed us, “I have powered up the reactor. Avoid the ends of the poles. They are hot.” “Hot, as in radioactive?” Jesry asked. “No. Hot as in ouch. They are where the system radiates its waste heat into space.” Then, after a pause: “But they’re also radioactive.”

As long as we were careful about which way the mirror was pointing, we would not be visible against the backdrop of space, because the mirror would be reflecting some other part of space, and all space looked more or less the same: black. If they just happened to zoom in on us with a really good telescope they might happen to notice a star or two in the wrong place, but this was unlikely.

Jesry disconnected, and motioned for me to do the same. We formed a private connection. Jesry launched into a very old, well-worn dialog that we’d had to memorize as fids: a verbal proof that the square root of two was an irrational number. I did my best to hold up my end of it. When we were finished, we reconnected to the reticule and waited a few seconds. “Nothing,” Sammann said. Again we disconnected and formed a two-person link. “Do you remember back at Edhar,” I began, “when we and the other Incanters would sit around after dinner making Everything Killers out of cornstalks and shoelaces?” “Of course,” Jesry said, “those were really good Everything Killers because they could assassinate filthy Panjandrums like no one’s business.” “That’ll come in handy when we betray Arbre to the Pedestal,” I pointed out.

“It is in no way boring,” said Fraa Jad, and glanced over my way to verify that I was doing my job: which as far as I could tell was merely to remain conscious.

“Yes. So, one moment, they are feeling triumphant. The next, out of nowhere, all of a sudden, their World Burner has been wrecked. A bunch of their people are dead. One of the twelve Vertices has been seized by Arbran commandos.”

“The first draft of everything is going to be wood and earth,” I told him, as we passed by a mixed team of avout and Sæculars pounding sharpened logs into the ground. “By the time I die, we should have a rough idea of how the place works. Later generations can begin planning how to do it all over again in stone.”

Cord and Yul were joined in matrimony by Magister Sark, who pulled it off pretty well, considering he’d been up until three A.M. in Dialog with Arsibalt over bottles of wine.

Criscan had decided that he didn’t like Lio very much, but was making a visible effort to tolerate him.