Anathem

“We have come,” said the man in the robes. “We have answered your call.” He was speaking Orth. Not as well as Jules Verne Durand, but well enough to make me think he had been studying it for almost as long. As long as we didn’t snow him with arcane tenses and intricate sentence structures, he would be able to keep up.

I say “we,” but I didn’t expect to do much talking. “Why am I here?” I’d asked Fraa Jad, as we had approached the gate of the building that floated in the center of Orb One.

“To serve as amanuensis,” he had replied.

“These people can build self-sufficient intercosmic starships, but they don’t have recording devices?”

“An amanuensis is more than a recording device. An amanuensis is a consciousness-bearing system, and so what it observes in its cosmos has effects in others, in the manner we spoke of at Avrachon’s Dowment.”

“You’re a consciousness-bearing system. And you seem to be much better at playing this polycosmic chess game than I am. So doesn’t that make me exiguous?”

“Much pruning has taken place in recent weeks. I am now absent in many versions of the cosmos where you are present.”

“You mean, you’re dead and I’m alive.”

“Absent and present express it better, but if you insist on using those terms, I won’t quibble.”

“Fraa Jad?”

“Yes, Fraa Erasmas?”

“What happens to us after we die?”

“You already know as much of it as I do.”

About then the conversation had been interrupted as we had been ushered into the room featuring the man in the robes. Knowing nothing of Urnudan culture put me at a disadvantage in trying to puzzle out who this man was. The room offered no clues. It was a sphere with a flat floor, like a smallish planetarium. I guessed that it was situated near the geometric center of the Orb. The inner surface was matte, and glowed softly with piped-in sunlight. The circular floor had a chair in the middle, surrounded by a ring-shaped bench. A few receptacles, charged with steaming fluids, were arranged on the bench. Otherwise the room was featureless and undecorated. I felt at home here.

“We have answered your call.”

What was Fraa Jad going to say to that? A few possible responses strayed into my head: Well, what took you so long? or What the hell are you talking about? But Fraa Jad answered in a shrewdly noncommittal way by saying, “Then I have come to bid you welcome.”

The man turned sideways and extended an arm toward the circular bench. The robes unfurled and hung from his arm like a banner. They were mostly white, but elaborately decorated. I wanted to say that they were brocade or embroidery, but life among bolt-wearing ascetics had left me with a deeply impoverished vocabulary where the decorative arts were concerned, so I’ll just say that they were fancy. “Please,” the man said, “we have tea. A purely symbolic offering, since your bodies can do nothing with it, but…”

“We shall be pleased to drink your tea,” Fraa Jad said.

So we repaired to the circular bench and took seats. I let Fraa Jad and our host sit relatively close, facing each other, and arranged myself somewhat farther away. Our host picked up his teacup and made what I guessed was some kind of polite ceremonial gesture with it, which Fraa Jad and I tried to copy. Then we all sipped. It was no worse and no better than what “Zh’vaern” used to eat at Messal. I didn’t think I’d be taking any home with me.

The man drew some notes from a pocket in his robe and consulted them from time to time as he delivered the following. “I am called Gan Odru. In the history of the Daban Urnud, I am the forty-third person to bear the title of Gan; Odru is my given name. The closest translation of Gan into Orth is ‘Admiral.’ This only approximates its meaning. In our military system, one class of officers were responsible for the trees, another for the forest.”

“Tactics and strategy respectively,” Fraa Jad said.

“Exactly. ‘Gan’ was the highest-ranking strategic officer, responsible for direction of a whole fleet, and reporting to civilian authorities, when there were any. Command of specific vessels was delegated by the Gan to tactical officers with the rank of Prag, or what you would call a captain. I apologize for perhaps boring you with this, but it is a way to explain the manner in which the Daban Urnud has behaved toward Arbre.”

“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.

“The first Gan of the Daban Urnud was entrusted with the responsibility to establish a colony on another star system,” Gan Odru continued. “As links to Urnud became more tenuous with distance, his responsibilities grew, and he became the supreme authority, answerable to no one. But he was a strange kind of Gan in that his fleet consisted of but one ship and so his staff consisted of but one Prag, and inasmuch as the Prag had no real tactical decisions to make-as the war had been left far behind-the relationship between Gan and Prag became unstable, and evolved. A simple way to express it is that the Gan became somewhat like your avout, and the Prag like your Sæcular Power. This state of affairs came about over the course of but a single generation, but proved extraordinarily stable, and has not changed since. The clothing that I wear is but little changed from the formal dress uniforms worn by the Gans of Urnud’s ocean-going fleets thousands of years ago. Though, of course, they did not wear them aboard ship, since it is difficult to swim in robes.”

Humor was the last thing I was looking for here and so astonishment got the better of mirth and I chuckled too little and too late.

“The second Gan was weakened by illness and served for only six years. The third was a young protege of the first; he had a long career, and through the force of his personality and his uncommon intelligence, gained back some of the power that his office had ceded to that of the Prags. Late in his career, he became aware of your summons, and made the decision to alter the trajectory of the Daban Urnud so that it would-as he conceived it-fly into the past. For the signals that he and the others heard, they conceived as ancestral voices calling them home to make the Urnud that should have been but that, through its leaders’ follies, it had failed to become.

“I suppose you have already some notion of the wanderings that followed, the Advents at Tro, Earth, and Fthos and their consequences. My purpose is not to rehearse all of that history but to give an account of our actions here.”

“It will be useful,” Fraa Jad said, “to know what occurred with the Warden of Heaven.”

“For a long time,” said Gan Odru, shifting into a lower gear, as he was now making it up as he went along instead of reading from notes, “the relationship between the Gans and the Prags has been poisoned. The Prags have said that the third Gan was simply wrong. That all the wanderings of the Daban Urnud have been without meaning-simply the endless consequence of an ancient mistake. Believing that, they saw their only purpose as self-preservation. Those who think this way want only to settle down somewhere and go on living. And, with each Advent, some do. We have left Urnudans behind on Tro, Troans behind on Earth, and so on. They find ways to live even though those cosmi are not their own. So, of the cynical ones, the ones who believe it is all a meaningless error, a large fraction are bled off at each Advent. At the same time we are joined by ones from the new cosmos who believe in the quest. So the ship is rebuilt and departs for the next cosmos. At first the Gans have power and the Prags do their bidding. But the journey is long, the quest is forgotten as generations go by, the Prags gain, the Gans lose, power. The Pedestal and the Fulcrum have long been our names for these two tendencies. And so here you see me, virtually alone in this place of ceremony, doing what my predecessors did, but with little respect and no power.

“Thus came we to Arbre. Prag Eshwar, my counterpart, and her followers saw your planet as just another civilization to be raided for its resources, so that the ship could be rebuilt and the journey extended. Yet Eshwar is an intelligent woman who has read our histories and well knows that, in an Advent, the Pedestal and the Prag tend to lose power to the Fulcrum and the Gan. Already she was choosing tactics to forestall this.

“When the Warden of Heaven came to us, it was obvious that he was a fool, a charlatan. We already knew as much, of course, from our surveillance of Arbre’s popular culture. And the Prag had already devised a plan, to draw comparisons between me and this Warden of Heaven. To make his foolishness, his falseness, rub off on me.

“So the Warden of Heaven was brought here in his spacesuit. He kept wanting to take it off. We advised against it. When he came in to this room, he saw it as a kind of holy place, and insisted that the risk of removing his suit was acceptable. That his god would watch over him and keep him safe. So, off came the suit. He became short of breath. Our physicians tried to reassemble the suit around him but this did not help matters, for he had already suffered the bursting of a major blood vessel. The physicians next tried to put him in a cold hyperbaric chamber, a therapy in which they are well practiced. He was stripped naked and readied for the procedure, but it was too late-he died. A debate followed as to what should be done with the body. While some of us debated, overzealous researchers took samples of his blood and tissues, and commenced an autopsy. So the body had already been desecrated, if you will. Prag Eshwar made the decision that any effort to apologize would be taken as a sign of weakness and that any sharing of information would only benefit Arbre. And too, for internal political reasons, she was inclined to show contempt, or at least disregard, for the body-because she had made it into a symbol for me. Hence the style in which the Warden of Heaven was returned.”

“But it backfired,” I said, “didn’t it?”

“Yes. Those of the Fulcrum were embarrassed and ashamed, and conceived a plan to make an exchange of blood for blood. As we had taken samples of blood from the Warden of Heaven’s body, they would convey samples of our blood to the surface of Arbre. We had detected signals from the planet, which, as we later learned, had been sent by Fraa Orolo. These took the form of an analemma. Jules Verne Durand had become the foremost authority on Orth and on the avout. He was covertly sympathetic to the Fulcrum. He interpreted Orolo’s signal as pointing to Ecba, and suggested that it would have profound symbolic value to deliver the samples there. He even volunteered to go down on the probe. But at about the same time he was ordered to go on the raid to the concent of the Matarrhites, and so was no longer available. Lise went in his stead-without his knowledge, of course. For she had learned much of the avout, and even a few words of Orth, from Jules. It went wrong and she was shot while boarding the probe, as you know.”

We let a few moments pass untroubled by words.

“Since then things have moved fast. I would say that Prag Eshwar has done what Prags do, which is-”

“React tactically, with no thought of strategy,” Jad said.

“Yes. It led us to this pass. Thirty-one have been slain by your fraas and suurs-from the Ringing Vale, I presume?”

Fraa Jad made no response, but Gan Odru looked my way, and I nodded. He continued, “Eighty-seven more are held hostage-your colleagues herded them into a chamber and welded the doors shut.”

“A misinterpretation,” Fraa Jad said. “Such people do not take hostages, so the eighty-seven were put in that room to keep them safely out of the way.”

“Prag Eshwar interprets it, rightly or wrongly, as hostage-taking, and prepares a response with one hand. With her other hand she has reached out to me and asked me to discuss matters with you. She is shaken. I don’t really know why. The large bomb that was destroyed has always been a weapon of last resort; no one would seriously consider using it.”

“Pardon me, Gan Odru, but the Pedestal was getting ready to launch it,” I blurted.

“As a threat, yes-to hang above your planet and exert pressure. But that is its only real use. I don’t understand why its loss has shaken Prag Eshwar so deeply.”

“It didn’t,” Fraa Jad said. “Prag Eshwar sensed terrible danger.”

“How would you know this?” Gan Odru asked politely.

Fraa Jad ignored the question. “She might explain it by claiming that she had a nightmare, or that sudden inspiration struck her in the bath, or that she has a gut feeling that tells her she ought to steer a safer course.”

“And is this something that you brought about!?” Gan Odru said, more as exclamation than as question. He was getting very little satisfaction from Fraa Jad, and so turned to look at me. I can’t guess what he saw on my face. Some mix of bemusement and shock. For I had just seen a glimpse of an alternate Narrative in which we had visited appalling destruction upon one of the Orbs.

“That we might send a signal to Prag Eshwar-is that such a difficult thing to believe for you, Gan Odru, the Heritor of a tradition, a thousand years old, founded on the belief that my predecessors summoned you hither?”

“I suppose not. But it is so easy, after all this time, to harbor doubts. To think of it as a religion whose god has died.”

“It is good to doubt it,” Fraa Jad said. “After all, the Warden of Heaven’s mistake was failure to doubt. But one must choose the target of one’s doubt with care. Your third Gan detected a flow of information from another cosmos, and saw it as cryptic messages from his ancestors. Your Prags, ever since, have doubted both halves of the story. You disbelieve only one half: that the signal came from your ancestors. But you may still believe that the signal exists while discarding the third Gan’s incorrect notions as to its source. Believe, then, that information-the Hylaean Flow-passes between cosmi.”

“But if I may ask-have you learned the power to modulate that signal, to send messages thus?”

I was all ears. But Fraa Jad said nothing. Gan Odru waited for a few moments, then said, “I suppose we’ve already established that, haven’t we? You apparently got inside Prag Eshwar’s head somehow.”

“What signal did the third Gan receive nine centuries ago?” I asked.

“A prophecy of terrible devastation. Robed priests massacred, churches torn down, books burning.”

“What gave him the idea it was from the past?”

“The churches were enormous. The books, written in unfamiliar script. On some of their burning leaves were geometrical proofs unknown to us-but later verified by our theors. On Urnud we had legends of a lost, mythic Golden Age. He assumed that he was being given a window into it.”

“But what he was really seeing was the Third Sack,” I said.

“Yes, so it seems,” said Gan Odru. “And my question is: did you send us the visions, or did it just happen?”

We have come…we have answered your call. Was he the last priest of a false religion? Was he no different from the Warden of Heaven?

“The answer is not known to me,” said Fraa Jad. He turned to look at me. “You shall have to search for it yourself.”

“What about you?” I asked him.

“I am finished here,” Fraa Jad said.