Anathem

Part 4

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.