Anathem

Working in a hole in the ground had made me ignorant of all these goings-on. But now that Jesry had let me know that my fraas and suurs were working so hard, I redoubled my efforts with the tablet. Stored on that thing I had all of seventeen clear nights. Once I got the knack, it took me about half an hour’s work to configure the tablet to give me the time exposure for a given night. Then, using a protractor, I would spend another half hour or so measuring the angles between streaks. As Jesry had predicted, some birds made slightly larger angles than others, reflecting their longer periods, but the angle for a given bird was always the same, every orbit, every night. So in a sense it only took a single night’s observations to make a rough draft of the census. But I went ahead and did it for all seventeen of the clear nights anyway, just to be thorough, and because frankly I had no idea what to do next. I could polish off one, sometimes two nights’ observations every time I got a chance to go down into that sub-cellar, but I didn’t get that chance every day.

By the time I finished, I had been at it for about three weeks. Buds were out on the page trees. Birds were flying north. Fraas and suurs were poking around in their tangles, arguing about whether it was time to plant. The barbarian weed-horde was marshaling on the riverbank and getting ready to invade the fertile Plains of Thrania. Arsibalt was two-thirds of the way through his pile of Paphlagon. The vernal equinox was only a few days away. Apert had begun on the morning of the autumnal equinox-half a year ago! I could not understand where the time had gone.

It had gone the same place as all the thousands of years before it. I had spent it working. It didn’t matter that my work was secret, illicit, and could have got me Thrown Back. The concent didn’t care about that. Certain persons would have cared a lot. But this was a place for the avout to spend their lives working on such projects. And now that I had a project, I was a part of that concent in a way I’d never been before, and the place was the right place for me.

Since Arsibalt, Jesry, and Tulia had their minds on other projects, I didn’t tell them about Sammann. That was a topic reserved for Lio when we were out in the meadow coaxing the starblossom to grow in the right direction. Or, since it was Lio, doing whatever else had most recently jumped into his mind.

We had reacted in different ways to the loss of Orolo. In my case, it was bloody revenge fantasies that I kept to myself. Lio, on the other hand, had become entranced by ever weirder varieties of vlor. Two weeks ago, he had tried to get me interested in rake vlor, which I guessed was inspired by the story of Diax casting out the Enthusiasts. I had declined on grounds of not wanting to get a blood infection-a weaponized rake could give you mass-produced puncture wounds. Last week he had developed a keen interest in shovel vlor, and we had spent a lot of time squatting on the riverbank sharpening spades with rocks.

When he led me down to the river again one day, I assumed it was for more of the same. But he kept looking back over his shoulder and leading me in deeper. I’d been on enough furtive expeditions as a fid to know that he was checking the sight-lines to the Warden Regulant’s windows. Old habits kicked in; I became silent, and moved from one shady place to another until we had reached a place where the bending river had cut away the bank to form an overhang, sheltered from view. Fortunately no one was there having a liaison just now. It would have been a bad place for it anyway: mucky ground, lots of bugs, high probability of being interrupted by avout messing around on the river in boats.

Lio turned to face me. I was almost worried that he was going to make a pass at me.

But no. This was Lio we were talking about.

“I’d like you to punch me in the face,” he said. As if he were asking me to scratch his back.

“Not that I haven’t always dreamed of it,” I said, “but why would you want it?”

“Hand-to-hand combat has been a common element of military training down through the ages,” he proclaimed, as if I were a fid. “Long ago it was learned that recruits-no matter how much training they had received-tended to forget everything they knew the first time they got punched in the face.”

“The first time in their lives, you mean?”

“Yeah. In peaceful, affluent societies where brawling is frowned on, this is a common problem.”

“Not being punched in the face a lot is a problem?”

“It is,” Lio said, “if you join the military and find yourself in hand-to-hand combat with someone who is actually trying to kill you.”

“But Lio,” I said, “you have been punched in the face. It happened at Apert. Remember?”

“Yes,” he said, “and I have been trying to learn from that experience.”

“So why do you want me to punch you in the face again?”

“As a way to find out whether I have learned.”

“Why me? Why not Jesry? He seems more the type.”

“That is the problem.”

“I see your point. Why not Arsibalt, then?”

“He wouldn’t do it for real-and then he’d complain that he’d hurt his hand.”

“What are you going to tell people if you show up for dinner with a busted face?”

“That I was battling evildoers.”

“Try again.”

“That I was practicing falls, and landed wrong.”

“What if I don’t want to mess up my hand?”

He smiled and produced a pair of heavy leather work gloves. “Stuff some rags under the knuckles,” he suggested, as I was pulling them on, “if you’re that worried about it.”

Grandsuurs Tamura and Ylma drifted by on a punt. We pretended to pull weeds until they were out of sight.

“Okay,” Lio said, “my objective is to perform a simple takedown on you-”

“Oh, now you tell me!”

“Nothing we haven’t done a hundred times,” he said, as if I would find this reassuring. “That’s why we came here.” He stomped the damp sand of the riverbank. “Soft ground.”

“Why-?”

“If I put up my hands to defend my face, I won’t be able to complete my objective.”

“I get it.”

Suddenly he came at me and took me down. “You lose,” he proclaimed, getting up.

“Okay.” I sighed, and clambered to my feet. Immediately he wheeled around and took me down again. I threw a playful blow at his head, way too late. This time he took me down a lot harder. Every one of the small muscles in my head felt as if it had been strained. He planted a dirty hand on top of my face and shoved off while getting back to his feet. The message was clear.

The next time I tried for real, but I didn’t have my feet planted and wasn’t able to hit very hard. And he was coming in too low.

The time after that, I got my center of gravity low, planted my feet in the mud, made a bone connection from hip to fist, and drilled him right on the cheekbone. “Good!” he moaned, as he was climbing off me. “See if you can actually slow me down though-that’s the whole point, remember?”

I think we did it about ten more times. Since I was suffering a lot more abuse than he was, I sort of lost track. On my best go, I was able to throw him off stride for a moment-but he still took me down.

“How much longer are we going to do this?” I asked, lying in the mud, in the bottom of an Erasmas-shaped crater. If I refused to get up, he couldn’t take me down.

He scooped up a double handful of river water and splashed it on his face, rinsing away blood from nostrils and eyebrows. “That should do,” he said. “I’ve learned what I wanted.”

“Which is?” I asked, daring to sit up.

“That I’ve adjusted, since what happened at Apert.”

“We did all that to obtain a negative result?” I exclaimed, getting to my knees.

“If you want to think of it that way,” he said, and scooped up more water.

I’d never get such a fine opportunity again, so I rolled up, put a foot in his backside, and sent him headlong into the river.

Later, as Lio was engrossed in the comparatively normal and sane activity of shovel-sharpening, I got us back on the topic of what I’d been seeing in the tablet: specifically, Sammann’s behavior during his noon visits.

Once I’d gotten over that sick feeling of having been found out, I’d begun to brood over some other questions. Was it merely a coincidence that the Ita who had discovered the dust jacket was the same one who had visited Cord in the machine hall? I reckoned that either it was a simple coincidence, or else that this Sammann was some kind of high-ranking Ita who was responsible for important tasks having to do with the starhenge. In any case, it booted me nothing to speculate about it.

“Has dis Ita tried to cobbudicade wid you?” Lio asked through puffy lips.

“You mean, like, sneaking into the math at night to slip me notes?”

Lio was baffled by my answer. He showed this in his usual way: by correcting his posture. The scrape of the rock on the shovel paused for a moment. Then he got it. “No, I don’t mean in real time,” he said. “I mean, on the tablet does he-you know.”

“No, Thistlehead, I have to confess I haven’t the faintest idea-”

“If anyone understands surveillance, it’s those guys,” Lio pointed out. “If you buy into Saunt Patagar’s Assertion, sure.”

Lio seemed disappointed that I was so naive as not to believe this. He went back to work on that rock. The scraping really set my teeth on edge but I reckoned it must be putting the hurt on any spies who might be eavesdropping.

Apparently my new role at the Concent of Saunt Edhar was to be the sheltered innocent. I said, “Well, answer me this. If they have us under total surveillance, they must know everything about me and the tablet, right?”

“Well, yeah, you’d think so.”

“So why hasn’t anything happened?” I asked him. “It’s not like Spelikon and Trestanas have soft spots for me.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” he insisted. “I don’t think there’s anything strange about that.”

“How do you figure?”

He paused long enough to give me the idea he was making up an answer on the spot. He dipped his sharpening-rock into the river. “The Ita can’t be telling the Warden Regulant everything they know. Trestanas would have to spend every minute of every day with them, to take in so much intelligence. The Ita must make decisions as to what they will pass on and what they will withhold.”

What Lio was saying opened up all sorts of interesting scenarios that would take me some time to sort out. I didn’t want to stand there with my mouth hanging open any longer than I already had, so I bent down and grabbed the handle of the shovel. It wasn’t going to get any sharper. I looked around for a stand of slashberry that needed to be massacred. It didn’t take long to find one. I made for it and Lio followed me.

“That’s giving the Ita a lot of responsibility,” I said, raising the shovel, then driving it down and forward into the roots of the slashberry canes. Several of them toppled. Most satisfying.

“Assume that they are as intelligent as we are,” Lio said. “Come on! They operate complicated syntactic devices for a living. They created the Reticulum. No one knows better than they do that knowledge is power. By employing strategy and tactics in what they say and what they don’t, they must be able to get things they want.”

I took down a square yard of slashberry while thinking about what he said.

“You’re saying there’s a whole world of Ita/hierarch politics going on over there that we know nothing about.”

“Has to be. Or else they wouldn’t be human,” Lio said.

Then he used Hypotrochian Transquaestiation on me: he changed the subject in such a way as to imply that the question had just been settled-that he had won the point and I had lost. “So, back to my question: does Sammann do anything else on the tablet that sends you a message-or at least indicates he knows that his image is being recorded?” He chucked his sharpening-rock into the river.

The correct response to Hypotrochian Transquaestiation was Hey, not so fast! but Lio’s question was so interesting that I didn’t make a fuss. “I don’t know,” I had to admit, after I’d spent an enjoyable minute or so taking down more slashberry. “But I’m getting bored measuring pie-slices. And I honestly don’t know what else to look at next. So I’ll have a look.”

After that I couldn’t get into the cellar for almost a week. The concent was getting ready for some equinox celebrations and so I had chant rehearsals. The weed war was entering a stage that demanded I draw at least one sketch of it. I had to get my tangle planted. When I was free, there always seemed to be other people at Shuf’s Dowment. The place was becoming hip!

“Be careful what you wish for,” Arsibalt moaned to me, one afternoon. I was helping him carry a stack of beehive frames into a wood shop. “I invited one and all to use the Dowment-now they are doing so-and I can’t work there!”

“Nor I,” I pointed out.

“And now this!” He picked up a putty knife, which I was pretty sure was the wrong tool for the job, and began to pick absent-mindedly at a patch of rotten wood on the corner of a frame. “Disaster!”

“Do you know anything about woodworking?” I asked.

“No,” he admitted.

“How about the metatheorical works of Fraa Paphlagon?”

“That I know a few things about,” he said. “And what is more, I think Orolo wanted us to learn about them.”

“How so?”

“Remember our last dialog with him?”

“Pink nerve-gas-farting dragons. Of course.”

“We must come up with a more dignified name for it before we commit it to ink,” Arsibalt said with a grimace. “Anyway, I believe that Orolo was pushing us to think about some of the ideas that were-are-important to his mentor.”

“Funny he didn’t mention Paphlagon, in that case,” I pointed out. “I remember talking about the later works of Saunt Evenedric, but-”

“One leads to the other. We would have found our way to Paphlagon in due course.”

“You would’ve, maybe,” I said. “What’s it all about?” This seemed a reasonable question. But Arsibalt flinched.

“The sort of stuff Procians hate us for.”

“Like, the Hylaean Theoric World?” I asked.

“That’s what they would call it, as a backhanded way of suggesting we are naive. But, starting at least as early as Protas, the idea of the HTW was developed into a more sophisticated metatheorics. So you could say that Paphlagon’s work is to classical Protan thought what modern group theory is to counting on one’s fingers.”

“But still related to it?”

“Certainly.”

“I’m just thinking back to my conversation with that Inquisitor.”

“Varax?”

“Yeah. I’m wondering whether his interest in the topic-”

“Correction: he was interested in whether we were interested in it,” Arsibalt pointed out.

“Yeah, exactly-whether that might be further evidence for the existence of the Hypothetical Important Fid of Suur Aculoa.”

“I think we should be careful speculating about the HIFOSA until Suur Tulia has actually found evidence of his or her existence,” Arsibalt said. “Otherwise we’ll be coming up with all manner of speculations that would never make it past the Rake.”

“Well, without telling me everything you know about it,” I said, “can you give me a clue as to why anyone in the Sæcular world would think Paphlagon’s work might be of practical importance?”

“Yes,” he said, “if you fix this beehive for me.”

“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.”

“Wow,” I said, “I’ll bet a philosopher would really jump down your throat for talking that way. It’s like saying that philosophy is nothing more than bad theorics.”

“There are some theors who would say so,” Arsibalt admitted. “But those people aren’t really talking about philosophy as philosophers would define it. Rather, they are talking about something that theors begin to do when they get right up to the edge of what they can prove using the equipment they’ve got. They drive philosophers crazy by calling it philosophy or metatheorics.”

“What kind of stuff are you talking about?”

“Well, they speculate as to what the next theory might look like. They develop the theory and try to use it to make predictions that might be testable. In the late Praxic Age, that usually meant constructing an even bigger and more expensive particle accelerator.”

“And then came the Terrible Events,” I said.

“Yes, no more expensive toys for theors after that,” Arsibalt said. “But it’s not clear that it actually made that much of a difference. The biggest machines, in those days, were already pushing the limits of what could be constructed on Arbre with reasonable amounts of money.”

“I hadn’t known that,” I said. “I always tend to assume there’s an infinite amount of money out there.”

“There might as well be,” Arsibalt said, “but most of it gets spent on pornography, sugar water, and bombs. There is only so much that can be scraped together for particle accelerators.”

“So the Turn to Cosmography might have happened even without the Reconstitution.”

“It was already happening,” Arsibalt said, “as the theors of the very late Praxic Age were coming to terms with the fact that no machine would be constructed during their lifetimes that would be capable of testing the theorics to which they were devoting their careers.”

“So those theors had no alternative but to look to the cosmos for givens.”

“Yes,” Arsibalt said. “And in the meantime we have people like Fraa Paphlagon.”

“Meaning what? Both theors and philosophers?”

He thought about it. “I’m trying to respect your earlier request that I not simply bury you in Paphlagon,” he explained, when he caught me looking, “but this forces me to work harder.”

“Fair is fair,” I pointed out, brandishing a crosscut saw that I had been putting to use.

“You could think of Paphlagon-and presumably Orolo-as descendants of people like Evenedric.”

“Theors,” I said, “who turned to philosophy when theorics stopped.”

“Slowed down,” Arsibalt corrected me, “waiting for results from places like Saunt Bunjo’s.”

Bunjo was a Millenarian math built around an empty salt mine two miles underground. Its fraas and suurs worked in shifts, sitting in total darkness waiting to see flashes of light from a vast array of crystalline particle detectors. Every thousand years they published their results. During the First Millennium they were pretty sure they had seen flashes on three separate occasions, but since then they had come up empty.

“So, in the meantime, they’ve been fooling around with ideas that people like Evenedric came up with when they reached the edge of theorics?”

“Yes,” Arsibalt said. “There was a profusion of them, right around the time of the Reconstitution, all variations on the theme of the polycosm.”

“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.”

“But the polycosmic theories I’ve heard about-the circa-Reconstitution ones-are a whole different kettle of fish. In those theories, there are multiple cosmi separate from our own-but similar. Full of matter and energy and fields. Always changing. Not eternal triangles.”

“Not always as similar as you think,” Arsibalt said. “Paphlagon is part of a tradition that believed that classical Protism was just another polycosmic theory.”

“How could you possibly-”

“I can’t tell you without telling you everything,” Arsibalt said, holding up his fleshy hands. “The point I’m getting at is that he believes in some form of the Hylaean Theoric World. And that there are other cosmi. Those are the topics Suur Aculoa is interested in.”

“So if the HIFOSA really exists-” I said.

“He or she summoned Paphlagon because the polycosm somehow became a hot topic.”

“And we are guessing that whatever made it hot, also triggered the closure of the starhenge.”

Arsibalt shrugged.

“Well, what could that possibly be?”

He shrugged again. “That’s one for you and Jesry. But don’t forget that the Panjandrums might simply be confused.”

Finally one day I made it down into the sub-cellar of Shuf’s Dowment and spent three hours watching Sammann eat lunches. He made the trip almost every day, but not always at the same time. If the weather was fine and the time of day was right, he would sit on the parapet, spread out some food on a little cloth, and enjoy the view while he ate. Sometimes he read a book. I couldn’t identify all of his little morsels and delicacies, but they looked better than what we had for lunch. Sometimes, if the wind blew out of the northeast, we could smell the Ita cooking. It always seemed as if they were taunting us.

“Results!” I proclaimed to Lio the next time I was alone with him in the meadow. “Sort of.”

“Yeah?”

“You were right, I think.”

“Right about what?” For so much time had passed that he had forgotten our earlier talk about Sammann. I had to remind him. Then, he was taken aback. “Wow,” he said, “this is big.”

“Could be. I still don’t know what to make of it,” I said.

“What does he do? Hold up a sign in front of the Eye? Use sign language?”

“Sammann’s too clever for that,” I said.

“What? It sounds like you’re speaking of an old friend.”

“I almost feel that way about him by this point. He and I have had a lot of lunches together.”

“So, how does he-did he-talk to you?”

“For the first sixty-eight days, he’s a real bore,” I said. “Then on Day Sixty-nine, something happens.”

“Day Sixty-nine? What does that mean to the rest of us?”

“Well, it’s about two weeks after the solstice and nine days before Orolo got Thrown Back.”

“Okay. So what does Sammann do on Day Sixty-nine?”

“Well, normally, when he gets to the top of the stair, he unslings a bag from his shoulder and hangs it around a stone knob that sticks up from the parapet there. He cleans the optics. Then he goes over and sits on the parapet-it has a flat top about a foot wide-and takes his lunch out of that bag and spreads it out there and eats it.”

“Okay. What happens on Day Sixty-nine?”

“In addition to the shoulder bag, he is carrying something cradled in one arm like a book. The first thing he does is set this down on the parapet. Then he goes about his usual routine.”

“So it’s sitting there in plain view of the Eye.”

“Exactly.”

“Can you zoom in on it?”

“Of course.”

“Can you read its title?”

“Turns out it’s not a book at all, Lio. It is another dust jacket-just like the one Sammann found up there the first day. Except this one is big and heavy because it contains-”

“Another tablet!” Lio exclaimed, then paused to consider it. “I wonder what that means.”

“Well, we have to assume he had just picked it up elsewhere in the starhenge.”

“He doesn’t leave it there, I assume.”

“No, when he’s finished eating he takes it with him.”

“I wonder why he’d choose that day of all days to snatch a tablet.”

“Well, I’m thinking it must have been around Day Sixty-nine that Fraa Spelikon’s investigation of Orolo really began to pick up steam. Now, you might remember that when I sneaked up there during the Anathem, on Day Seventy-eight, I checked the M amp; M-”

“And found it empty,” Lio said with a nod. “So. On Day Sixty-nine, Spelikon probably ordered Sammann to fetch the tablet that Orolo had left in the M amp; M. Which Sammann did. But Spelikon didn’t know about the one you’d put in Clesthyra’s Eye, so he didn’t ask for it.”

“But Sammann knew,” I reminded him. “He had noticed it on Day Two.”

“And had made up his mind not to tell Spelikon. But on Day Sixty-nine he didn’t try to hide the fact that he’d just grabbed Orolo’s tablet.” Lio shook his head. “I don’t get it. Why would he risk letting you know that?”

I threw up my hands. “Maybe it’s not such a risk for him. He’s already Ita. What can they do to him?”

“Good point. They can’t be nearly as afraid of the Warden Regulant as we are.”

I was a little bit irritated to be reminded that we were afraid, but, considering all of the skulking around I’d been doing lately, I couldn’t argue.

I’d been getting better, I realized. Recovering from the loss of Fraa Orolo. Forgetting how sad and angry I was. And when Lio mentioned the Warden Regulant, it reminded me.

Anyway, there was a long silence now as Lio assimilated all of this. We actually got some work done. On the weeds I mean.

“Well,” he finally said, “what happens after that?”

“Day Seventy, cloudy. Day Seventy-one, snowing. Day Seventy-two, snowing. Can’t see anything because the lens is covered. Day Seventy-three, it’s brilliant weather. Most of the snow has melted off by the time Sammann gets there. He cleans the place up and has lunch. He’s wearing goggles.”

“Like sunglasses?”

“Bigger and thicker.”

“Like what mountain climbers wear?”

“That’s what I thought at first,” I said. “Actually, I had to watch Day Seventy-three several times before I got it.”

“Got what?” Lio asked. “It was bright, there was snow, he wore dark goggles.”

“Really dark,” I said. “I don’t think that these were ordinary goggles like an outdoorsman would wear. I’ve seen these goggles before, Lio. When I saw Cord and Sammann in the machine hall, during Apert, they were wearing these things to shield their eyes from the arc. An arc that’s as bright as the sun.”

“But why would Sammann suddenly start wearing such a getup to clean the lenses?”

“He doesn’t actually have them on while he’s cleaning. They’re dangling around his neck on a strap,” I said. “Then he puts them on and eats his lunch as usual. But the entire time that he’s eating, he’s staring directly into the sun. Sammann is watching the sun.”

“And he never did this before Day Sixty-nine?”

“Nope. Never.”

“So do you think that he learned something-?”

“Something from Fraa Orolo’s tablet, maybe?” I said. “Or something Spelikon told him? Or perhaps scuttlebutt from other Ita in other concents, talking, or whatever they do, over the Reticulum?”

“Why watch the sun? That is completely off the track of what you have been doing, isn’t it?”

“Completely. But it’s something. It is a big fat hint. A gift from Sammann.”

“So, have you started looking at the sun too?”

“I don’t have goggles,” I reminded him, “but I do have twenty-odd clear sunny days recorded on that tablet. So starting tomorrow I can at least look at what the sun was doing three and four months ago.”