Anathem

I’d been flattering myself that Fraa Jad might want to talk to me; he had, after all, sent me off on a mission that had almost killed me three times. But unlike Moyra he was not the type to hang around in the kitchen post-messal, rapping with the servitors and washing dishes. By the time we were done cleaning up, he was gone to wherever it was that the Convox stowed Thousanders when not in use.

It was just another reason I wanted to track down Lio. On the drive from Edhar to Bly’s Butte, Fraa Jad had confided in both of us-or so we believed-by dropping the hint that he was unnaturally old. If I were going to seek out Jad and take the dialog to the next stage-whatever that might be-Lio should be there with me.

The only problem was that I seemed to have sprouted an entourage: Emman, Arsibalt, and Barb. If I led those three into a meeting of the seditious conspiracy of which Lio was now part, Arsibalt would black out and have to be dragged back to his cell, Barb would blab it to the whole Convox, and Emman would report us to the Panjandrums.

While mopping the kitchen floor, I hit on the idea of leading them to Jesry’s Lucub instead. With luck, I could shed some or all of them there.

As we were informed while trying to find Jesry-in Emman’s case, by a jeejah message, and for the rest of us, by coded bell-ringing from a carillon in the Precipice-Lucub had been canceled. Everything, in fact, except Laboratorium and Messal had been suspended until further notice, and the only reason we still had Messal was that we had to eat in order to work. The rest of the time, we were supposed to analyze the Geometers’ ship. The S?culars had syntactic systems for building and displaying three-dimensional models of complicated objects, and so the goal, now, was to create such a model, correct down to the last strut, hatch, and weld, of the starship orbiting our planet-or at least of its outer shell, which was all of it we could see. Emman was proficient in the use of this modeling system, and so he was called away to toil in a Laboratorium with a lot of Ita. As I understood it, he wasn’t actually doing any modeling work-just getting the system to run. Those of us with theorical training had been assigned to new Laboratoria whose purpose was to pore over the phototypes from last night and integrate them into the model.

Some such tasks were more demanding than others. The propulsion system, with jets of plasma interacting with the pusher plate, was difficult even for a Jesry to understand. He’d been assigned to penetrate the mysteries of the X-ray laser batteries. I was on a team analyzing the large-scale dynamics of the entire ship. 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. Imagine a circular railway built around the inner surface of the icosahedron, making a complete circuit, and a freight train running around it in an eternal loop. If the train applied its brakes, it would dump some of its angular momentum into the icosahedron and force it to spin. By releasing the brakes and hitting the throttle, it could reverse the effect. As of last night, it was obvious that the Hedron contained half a dozen such systems-two, running opposite directions, on each of three axes. How big might they be, how much power could they exchange with the ship? What might that imply about what they were made of? More generally, by making precise measurements of how the Hedron had maneuvered, what could we infer about the size, mass, and spin rate of the inhabited section that was hidden inside?

Arsibalt was put on a team using spectroscopy and other givens to figure out which parts of the ship had been forged in which cosmi; or had it all been made in one cosmos? Barb was assigned to make sense of a triangulated network of struts that had been observed projecting from the despun part of the ship. And so on. So six hours now went by during which I was completely absorbed in the problem to which I, and a team of five other theors, had been assigned. I didn’t have a moment to think about anything else until someone pointed out that the sun was rising, and we received a message that food was to be had on the great plaza that spread before the Mynster, at the foot of the Precipice.

Walking there, I tried to force gyroscope problems out of my head for a few minutes and consider the larger picture. Ignetha Foral had made no secret of her impatience yesterday evening. We’d emerged from the messal to find ourselves in a Convox that had abruptly been reorganized-along Sæcular lines. All of us were like praxics now, working on small bits of a problem whose entirety we might never get to see. Was this a permanent change? How would it affect the movement Lio had spoken of? Was it a deliberate strategy by which the Panjandrums intended to snuff that movement out? What Lio had told me had made me anxious, and I’d been afraid of what I might learn if I ever found my way to Ala’s Lucub. So I was relieved that it had been put into suspended animation. The conspiracy could have made no progress last night. But another part of me was concerned about how it might respond to being driven further underground.

Breakfast was being served out of doors, at long tables that the military had set up on the plaza. Convenient for us-but weirdly and intrusively Sæcular in style, and another hint that the Mathic hierarchs had lost or ceded power to the Panjandrums.

Emerging from the line with a hunk of bread, butter, and honey, I saw a small woman just in the act of taking a seat at an otherwise vacant table. I walked over quickly and took the seat across from her. The table was between us, so there was no awkwardness as to whether we should hug, kiss, or shake hands. She knew I was there, but remained huddled over her plate for a long moment, staring at her food, and, I thought, gathering her strength, before she raised her eyes and gazed into mine.

“Is this seat taken?” asked an approaching fraa in a complicated bolt, giving me the sort of ingratiating look I’d learned to associate with those who wanted to suck up to Edharians.

“Bugger off!” I said. He did.

“I sent you a couple of letters,” I said. “Don’t know if you got them.”

“Osa handed one to me,” she said. “I didn’t open it until after what happened with Orolo.”

“Why not?” I asked, trying to make my voice gentle. “I know about Jesry-”

The big eyes closed in pain-no-in exasperation, and she shook her head. “Forget about that. It’s just that too much else has been going on. I’ve not wanted to get distracted.” She leaned back against her folding chair, heaved a sigh. “After the Visitation of Orithena, I thought maybe I had better open up. Zoom out, as the extras say. I read your letter. I think-” Her brow folded. “I don’t know what I think. It’s like I’ve had three different lifetimes. Before Voco. Between Voco and Orolo’s death. And since then. And your letter-which was a respectable piece of work, don’t get me wrong-was written to an Ala two lifetimes gone.”

“I think that we could all tell similar stories,” I pointed out.

She shrugged, nodded, started to eat.

“Well,” I tried, “tell me about your current life, then.”

She looked at me, a little too long for comfort. “Lio told me that you spoke.”

“Yes.”

She finally broke eye contact, let her gaze wander over the breakfast tables, slowly filling up with weary fraas and suurs, and out over the lawns and towers of Tredegarh. “They brought me here to organize people. So that’s what I’ve been doing.”

“But not in the way they wanted?”

She shook her head quickly. “It’s more complicated than that, Erasmas.” It killed me to hear her speak my name. “Turns out that once you get an organization started, it takes on a life-lives by a logic-of its own. I suppose if I’d ever done this before, I’d have known it would be that way-would have planned for it.”

“Well-don’t beat yourself up.”

“I’m not beating myself up. That’s you putting emotions on me. Like clothes on a doll.”

The old feeling-a curious mix of irritation, love, and desire to feel more of it-came over me.

“See, they knew from the start that the Convox was vulnerable. An obvious target, if the pact opened hostilities.”

“The pact?”

“We call it PAQD now for Pangee-Antarct-Quator-Diasp. Less anthropomorphic than Geometers.”

But they are anthropomorphic, I was tempted to say. But I stifled it.

“I know,” she said, eyeing me, “they are anthropomorphic. Never mind. We call them the PAQD.”

“Well, I had been wondering,” I said. “Seems risky to put all the smart people in one square mile.”

“Yeah, but what they have drilled into me, over and over, is that it’s all about risk. The question is, what are the benefits that might be had in exchange for a given risk?”

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. But it seemed weirdly important to Ala that I listen, understand, and agree. She even reached out and put her hand on mine for a few moments, which focused my attention. So I went through a little pantomime of processing what she’d said and agreeing to it. “The benefit, here, being that maybe the Convox could do something halfway useful before it got blown up?” I asked.

That seemed to pass muster, so she plowed ahead. “I was assigned to risk mitigation, which is bulshytt meaning that if the PAQD does anything scary, this Convox is going to scatter like a bunch of flies when they see the flyswatter. And instead of scattering randomly, we are going to do it in a systematic, planned way-the Antiswarm, the Ita have been calling it-and we are going to stay on the Reticulum so that we can continue the essential functions of the Convox even as we are scurrying all over the place.”

“Did you start on this right away? Just after you got Evoked?”

“Yes.”

“So you knew from the outset that there was going to be a Convox.”

She shook her head. “I knew they-we-were laying plans for one. I didn’t know for sure it would actually happen-or who would be called. When it started to materialize, these plans that I’d been making came into sharper focus, took on depth. And then it became obvious to me-was unavoidable.”

“What became obvious?”

“What did Fraa Corlandin teach us of the Rebirth?”

I shrugged. “You studied harder than I. The end of the Old Mathic Age. The gates of the old maths flung open-torn off their hinges, in some cases. The avout dispersed into the S?culum-okay, I think I see where this is going now…”

“What the Sæcular Power had asked me to lay plans for-without understanding-was in many ways indistinguishable from a second Rebirth,” Ala said. “Because, Raz, not only Tredegarh would open its gates. If it comes to war with the PAQD, all of the concents will have to disperse. The avout will move among-mingle with-blend into the general population. Yet we’ll still be talking to one another over the Reticulum. Which means-”

“Ita,” I said.

She nodded, and smiled, warming to the task, to the picture she was building. “Each cell of wandering avout has to include some Ita. And it won’t be possible to maintain avout/Ita segregation any more. The Antiswarm will have tasks to carry out-not the kinds of things avout have traditionally done. Work of immediate Sæcular relevance.”

“A second Praxic Age,” I said.

“Exactly!” She’d become enthusiastic. I felt the excitement too. But I drew back from it, recollecting that it could only come to pass if we got into out-and-out war. She sensed this too, and clamped her face down into the kind of expression I imagined she wore when sitting in council with high military leaders. “It started,” she said, in a much lower voice-and by it I knew she meant the thing Lio had told me of-“it started in meetings with cell leaders. See, the cells-the groups we’re going to break into, if we trigger the Antiswarm-each has a leader. I’ve been meeting with those leaders, giving them their evacuation plans, familiarizing them with who’s in their cells.”

“So that’s-”

“Preordained. Yes. Everyone in the Convox has already been assigned to a cell.”

“But I haven’t-”

“You haven’t been informed,” Ala said. “No one has-except for the cell leaders.”

“You didn’t want to upset people-distract them-there was no point in letting them know,” I guessed.

“Which is about to change,” she said, and looked around as if expecting it to change now. And indeed I noticed that several more military drummons had pulled onto the grounds and parked at one end of this open-air Refectory. Soldiers were setting up a sound system. “That’s why we’re all eating together.” She snorted. “That’s why I’m eating at all. First meal worthy of the name I’ve had in three days. Now I get to relax for a little-let things play out.”

“What’s going to happen?”

“Everyone’s going to receive a pack, and instructions.”

“It can’t be random that we’re doing this out of doors under a clear sky,” I observed.

“Now you’re thinking like Lio,” she said approvingly, through a bite of bread. She swallowed and went on, “This is a deterrence strategy. The PAQD will see what we’re up to and, it is hoped, guess that we’re making preparations to disperse. And if they know that we are ready to disperse at a moment’s notice, they’ll have less incentive to attack Tredegarh.”

“Makes sense,” I said. “I guess I’ll have many more questions about that in a minute. But you were saying something about the meetings with the cell leaders-?”

“Yes. You know how it is with avout. Nothing gets taken at face value. Everything is peeled back. Dialoged. I was meeting with these people in small groups-half a dozen cell leaders at a time. Explaining their powers and responsibilities, role-playing different scenarios. And it seemed as though every group had one or two who wanted to take it further than the others. To put it in bigger historical perspective, draw comparisons to the Rebirth, and so on. The thing that Lio told you about was an outgrowth of that. Some of these people-I simply couldn’t answer all of their questions in the time allotted. So I put their names on a list and told them, ‘Later we’ll have a follow-up meeting to discuss your concerns, but it’ll have to be a Lucub because I have no time otherwise.’ And the timing just happened-and you can consider this lucky or unlucky, as you like-to coincide with the Visitation of Orithena.”

We were distracted now, as the sound system came alive. A hierarch asked for “the following persons” to come to the front-to approach the trucks, where soldiers were breaking open pallet-loads of military rucksacks, prepacked and bulging. The hierarch had obviously never spoken into a sound amplification device before, but soon enough she got the hang of it and began to call out the names of fraas and suurs. Slowly, uncertainly at first, those who’d been called began to get up from their seats and move up the lanes between tables. Conversation paused for a little while, then resumed in an altogether different tone, as people began to exclaim about it, and to speculate.

“Okay,” I said, “so here you are in a Lucub, in a chalk hall somewhere with all of the pickiest, most obstreperous cell leaders-”

“Who are wonderful, by the way!” Ala put in.

“I can imagine,” I said. “But they are all wanting to go deep on these topics-at the same moment you are getting news of that poor woman from Antarct who sacrificed her life-”

“And of what Orolo did for her,” she reminded me. And here she had to stop talking for a few moments, because grief had overtaken her in an unwary moment. We watched, or pretended to watch, avout coming back to their seats, each with a rucksack slung over one shoulder and a sort of badge or flasher hanging around the neck.

“Anyway,” she said, and paused to clear her throat, which had gone husky. “It was the strangest thing I’d ever seen. I’d expected we’d talk until dawn, and never arrive at a consensus. But it was the opposite of that. We walked in with a consensus. Everyone just knew that we had to make contact with whatever faction had sent that woman down. And that even if the S?culars wouldn’t allow such a thing, well, once we had turned into the Antiswarm-”

“What could they do to stop us?”

“Exactly.”

“Lio said something about using the guidestar lasers on the big telescopes to send signals?”

“Yes. It’s being talked about. Some might even be doing it for all I know.”

“Whose idea was that?”

She balked.

“Don’t get me wrong!” I assured her. “It’s a brilliant idea.”

“It was Orolo’s idea.”

“But you couldn’t have talked to him-!”

“Orolo actually did it,” Ala said, reluctantly, watching me closely to see how I’d react. “From Edhar. Last year. One of Sammann’s colleagues went up to the M amp; M and found the evidence.”

“Evidence?”

“Orolo had programmed the guidestar laser on the M amp; M to sweep out an analemma in the sky.”

A week or a month ago, I’d have denied it could possibly be true. But not now. “So Lodoghir was right,” I sighed. “What he accused Orolo of, at the Plenary, was dead on.”

“Either that,” Ala said, “or he changed the past.”

I didn’t laugh.

She continued, “You should know, too, that Lodoghir is one of this group I’ve been telling you about.”

“Fraa Erasmas of Edhar,” called the voice on the speaker.

“Well,” I said, “I guess I’d better go find out which cell you put me in.”

She shook her head. “It’s not like that. You won’t know that until it’s time.”

“How can we meet up with our cell if we don’t know who to look for?”

“If it happens-if the order goes out-your badge will come alive, and tell you where to go. When you get there,” Ala said, “the other people you will see, are the rest of your cell.”

I shrugged. “Seems sensible enough.” Because she had suddenly become somber, and I couldn’t guess why. She lunged across the table and grabbed my hand. “Look at me,” she said. “Look at me.”

When I looked at her I saw tears in her eyes, and a look on her face unlike any I’d ever seen before. Perhaps it was the same way my face had looked when I had gazed down out of the open door of the aerocraft and recognized Orolo. She was telling me something with that face that she did not have power to put in words. “When you come back to this table, I’ll be gone,” she said. “If I don’t see you again before it happens”-and I sensed this was a certainty in her mind-“you have to know I made a terrible decision.”

“Well, we all do, Ala! I should tell you about some of my recent terrible decisions!”

But she was already shaking me off, willing me to understand her words.

“Isn’t there any way to change your mind? Fix it? Make amends?” I asked.

“No! I mean, I made a terrible decision in the way that Orolo made a terrible decision before the gates of Orithena.”

It took me a few moments to see it. “Terrible,” I said at last, “but right.”

Then the tears came so hard she had to close her eyes and turn her back on me. She let go my hand and began to totter away, shoulders hunched as if she’d just been stabbed in the back. She seemed the smallest person in the Convox. Every instinct told me to run after her, put an arm around her bony shoulders. But I knew she’d break a chair over my head.

I walked up to the truck and got my rucksack and my badge: a rectangular slab, like a small photomnemonic tablet that had been blanked.

Then I went back to work estimating the inertia tensor of the Geometers’ ship.

I slept most of the afternoon and woke up feeling terrible. Just when my body had adjusted to local time, I had messed it up by keeping odd hours.

I went early to Avrachon’s Dowment. This evening’s recipe called for a lot of peeling and chopping, so I brought a knife and cutting board around to the front veranda and worked there, partly to enjoy the last of the sunlight, but also partly in hopes I might intercept Fraa Jad on his way to messal. Avrachon’s Dowment was a big stone house, not quite so fortress-like as some Mathic structures I could name, with balconies, cupolas and bow windows that made me wish I could be a member of it, just so that I could do my daily work in such charming and picturesque surrounds. As if the architect’s sole objective had been to ignite envy in the hearts of avout, so that they’d scheme and maneuver to get into the place. I was fortunate that such an exceptional chain of events had made it possible for me even to sit on its veranda for an hour peeling vegetables. My conversation with Ala had reminded me that I had better take advantage of the opportunity while I could. The Dowment was situated on a knoll, so I had a good view over open lawns that rambled among other dowments and chapterhouses. Groups of avout came and went, some talking excitedly, some silent, hunched over, exhausted. Fraas and suurs were strewn at random over the grounds, wrapped in their bolts, pillowed on their spheres, sleeping. To see so many, clothed in such varied styles, reminded me again of the diversity of the mathic world-a thing I’d never been aware of, until I’d come here-and cast Ala’s talk of a Second Rebirth in a different light. The idea of tearing the gates off the hinges was thrilling in a way, simply because it represented such a big change. But would it mean the end of all that the avout had built, in 3700 years? Would people in the future look with awe at empty Mynsters and think that we must have been crazy to walk away from such places?

I wondered who else might be assigned to my cell, and what tasks we might be assigned by those in charge of the Antiswarm. A reasonable guess was that I’d simply be with my new Laboratorium group, and that we’d go on doing the same sorts of things. Living in rooms in a casino in some random city, toiling over diagrams of the ship, eating Sæcular food brought up by illiterate servants in uniforms. The group included two impressive theors, one from Baritoe and one from a concent on the Sea of Seas. The others were tedious company and I didn’t especially relish the idea of being sent on the road with them.

Occasionally I would glimpse one of the Ringing Vale contingent and my heart would beat a little faster as I imagined what it would be like to be in a cell with them! Rank fantasy, of course-I would be worse than useless in such company-but fun to daydream about. No telling what such a cell would be ordered to do. But it would certainly be more interesting than guessing inertia tensors. Probably something incredibly dangerous. So perhaps it was for the best that they were out of my league.

Or-in a similar yet very different vein-what would Fraa Jad’s cell look like, and what sorts of tasks would they be assigned? How privileged I’d been, in retrospect, to have traveled in a Thousander’s company for a couple of days! As far as I’d been able to make out, he was the only Millenarian in the Convox.

I’d settle for being in a cell with at least one of the old clock-winding team from Edhar. Yet I doubted that this would be the case. Ala was quite obviously troubled by some aspect of the decisions she had made regarding cell assignments, and though I could not know just what was eating at her so, it did serve as a warning that I should not lull myself into imagining a happy time on the road with old friends. The respect-I was tempted to call it awe-with which we Edharians were viewed by many at the Convox made it unlikely that several of us would be concentrated in one cell. They would spread us out among as many cells as possible. We would be leaders, and lonely in the same way Ala was.

Fraa Jad approached from the direction of the Precipice. I wondered if they had given him a billet up on top, in the Thousanders’ math. If so, he must be spending a lot of time negotiating stairs. He recognized me from a distance and strolled right up.

“I found Orolo,” I said, though of course Jad already knew this. He nodded.

“It is unfortunate-what happened,” he said. “Orolo would have passed through the Labyrinths in due time, and become my fraa on the Crag, and it would have been good to work by his side, drink his wine, share his thoughts.”

“His wine was terrible,” I said.

“Share his thoughts, then.”

“He seemed to understand quite a lot,” I said. And I wanted to ask how-had he deciphered coded messages in the Thousanders’ chants? But I didn’t want to make a fool of myself. “He thinks-he thought-that you have developed a praxis. I can’t help but imagine that this accounts for your great age.”

“The destructive effects of radiation on living systems are traceable to interactions between individual particles-photons, neutrons-and molecules in the affected organism,” he pointed out.

“Quantum events,” I said.

“Yes, and so a cell that has just undergone a mutation, and one that has not, lie on Narratives that are separated by only a single forking in Hemn space.”

“Aging,” I said, “is due to transcription errors in the sequences of dividing cells-which are also quantum-level events-”

“Yes. It is not difficult to see how a plausible and internally consistent mythology could arise, according to which nuclear waste handlers invented a praxis to mend radiation damage, and later extended it to mitigate the effects of aging and so on.”

And so on seemed to cover an awful lot of possibilities, but I thought better of pursuing this. “You’re aware,” I said, “of how explosive that mythology is, if it gains currency in the S?culum?”

He shrugged. The S?culum was none of his concern. But the Convox was a different matter. “Some here want badly to see that mythology promoted to fact. It would give them comfort.”

“Zh’vaern was asking some weird questions about it,” I said, and nodded at a procession of Matarrhites wafting across the lawn some distance away.

It was a gambit. I hoped to bond with Fraa Jad by giving him an opening to agree with me that those people were weird and obnoxious. But he slid around it. “There is more to be learned from them than from any others at the Convox.”

“Really?”

“It would be impossible to pay too much attention to the cloaked ones.”

Two Matarrhites detached themselves from the procession and set a course for Avrachon’s Dowment. I watched Zh’vaern and Orhan come towards us for a few moments, wondering what Jad saw in them, then turned back to the Thousander. But he had slipped inside.

Zh’vaern and Orhan approached silently and entered the Dowment after greeting me, rather stiffly, on the veranda.

Arsibalt and Barb were a hundred feet behind them.

“Results?” I demanded.

“A piece of the PAQD ship is missing!” Barb announced.

“That structure you’ve been studying-”

“It’s where the missing piece used to be attached!”

“What do you think it was?”

“The inter-cosmic transport drive, obviously!” Barb scoffed. “They didn’t want us to see it, because it’s top secret! So they parked it farther out in the solar system.”

“How about your group, Arsibalt?”

“That ship is patched together from subassemblies built in all four of the PAQD cosmi,” Arsibalt announced. “It is like an archaeological dig. The oldest part is from Pangee. Very little of it remains. There are only a very few odds and ends from Diasp. Most of the ship is made of material from the Antarct and Quator cosmi-of the two, we are fairly certain that Quator was visited more recently.”

“Good stuff!” I said.

“How about you-what results have been produced by your group, Raz?” Barb asked.

I was collecting my things, getting ready to go inside. Arsibalt shuffled over to help me. “It sloshed,” I said.

“Sloshed?”

“When the Hedron made its spin move the other evening, the rotation wasn’t steady. It jiggled a little. We conclude that the spun part contains a large mass of standing water, and when you hit it with a sudden rotation, the water sloshes.” And I went off into a long riff about the higher harmonics of the sloshing, and what it all meant. Barb lost interest and went inside.

“What were you discussing with Fraa Jad?” Arsibalt asked.

I didn’t feel comfortable divulging the part of the talk that had been about praxis, so I answered-truthfully-“The Matarrhites. We’re supposed to keep an eye on them-learn from them.”

“Do you suppose he wants us to spy on them?” Arsibalt asked, fascinated. This gave me the idea that Arsibalt wanted, for some reason, to spy on them, and was looking for Jad’s blessing.

“He said it would be impossible to pay too much attention to the cloaked ones.”

“Is that how he phrased it!?”

“Pretty near.”

“He said ‘cloaked ones,’ rather than ‘Matarrhites’?”

“Yes.”

“They’re not Matarrhites at all!” Arsibalt said in an excited whisper. “I’ll take that if you don’t mind,” I said. For in his eagerness to help, he had reached for my cutting board. I confiscated the knife.

“You think I’m so profoundly insane that I can’t be trusted with sharp objects!” Arsibalt said, crestfallen.

“Arsibalt! If they aren’t Matarrhites, what are they? Panjandrums in disguise?”

He looked as if he were about to spill a great secret, but then Suur Tris came around, and he clammed up.

“I’ll take your hypothesis under advisement,” I said, “and weigh it on the Steelyard against the alternative-which is that the Matarrhites are Matarrhites.”