Anathem

“Are people starving to death? Or are they sick because they are too fat?”

Artisan Quin scratched his beard and thought about that one. “You’re talking of slines, I assume?”

Fraa Orolo shrugged.

Quin thought that was funny. Unlike Artisan Flec, he was not afraid to laugh out loud. “Sort of both at the same time,” he finally admitted.

“Very good,” said Fraa Orolo, in a now we’re getting somewhere tone, and glanced at me to make sure I was getting it down.

After the Flec interview, I had had words with Fraa Orolo. “Pa, what are you doing with that five-hundred-year-old questionnaire? It’s crazy.”

“It is an eight-hundred-year-old copy of an eleven-hundred-year-old questionnaire,” he had corrected me.

“It would be one thing if you were a Hundreder. But how could things have changed that much in only ten years?”

Fraa Orolo had told me that since the Reconstitution there had been forty-eight instances in which radical change had occurred in a decade, and that two of these had culminated in Sacks-so perhaps the sudden ones were the most important. And yet ten years was a long enough span of time that people who lived extramuros, immersed in day-to-day goings-on, might be oblivious to change. So a Tenner reading an eleven-hundred-year-old questionnaire to an artisan could perform a service to the society extramuros (assuming anyone out there was paying attention). Which might help to explain why we were not only tolerated but protected (except when we weren’t) by the Sæcular Power. “The man who looks at a mole on his brow every day when he shaves may not see that it is changing; the physician who sees it once a year may easily recognize it as cancer.”

“Beautiful,” I’d said. “But you’ve never cared about the Sæcular Power before, so what’s your real reason?”

He had pretended to be bewildered by the question. But, seeing I wasn’t going to back off, he had shrugged and said “Just a routine check for CDS.”

“CDS?”

“Causal Domain Shear.”

This had as much as proved that Orolo was only having me on. But sometimes he had a point when he was doing that.

Correction: he always had a point. Sometimes I was able to see it. So I had rested my face on my hands and muttered, “Okay. Open the floodgates.”

“Well. A causal domain is just a collection of things linked by mutual cause-and-effect relationships.”

“But isn’t everything in the universe so linked?”

“Depends on how their light cones are arranged. We can’t affect things in our past. Some things are too far away to affect us in any way that matters.”

“But still, you can’t really draw hard and fast boundaries between causal domains.”

“In general, no. But you are much more strongly webbed together with me by cause and effect than you are with an alien in a faraway galaxy. So, depending on what level of approximation you’re willing to put up with, you could say that you and I belong together in one causal domain, and the alien belongs in another.”

“Okay,” I had said, “what level of approximation are you willing to put up with, Pa Orolo?”

“Well, the whole point of living in a cloistered math is to reduce our causal linkages with the extramuros world to the minimum, isn’t it?”

“Socially, yes. Culturally, yes. Ecologically, even. But we use the same atmosphere, we hear their mobes driving by-on a pure theoric level, there is no causal separation at all!”

He hadn’t seemed to have heard me. “If there were another universe, altogether separate from ours-no causal linkages whatsoever between Universes A and B-would time flow at the same rate between them?”

“It’s a meaningless question,” I’d said, after having thought about it for a moment.

“That’s funny, it seemed meaningful to me,” he’d retorted, a little cross.

“Well, it depends on how you measure time.”

He’d waited.

“It depends on what time is!” I’d said. I had spent a few minutes going up various avenues of explanation, only to find each of them a dead end.

“Well,” I’d said finally, “I guess I have to invoke the Steelyard. In the absence of a good argument to the contrary, I have to choose the simplest answer. And the simplest answer is that time runs independently in Universe A and Universe B.”

“Because they are separate causal domains.”

“Yes.”

Orolo said, “What if these two universes-each as big and as old and as complicated as ours-were entirely separate, except for a single photon that managed to travel somehow between them. Would that be enough to wrench A’s time and B’s time into perfect lockstep for all eternity?”

I had sighed, as I always did when one of Orolo’s traps closed over me.

“Or,” he’d said, “is it possible to have a little bit of time slippage-shear-between causal domains that are connected only loosely?”

“So-back to your interview with Artisan Flec-you want me to believe that you were just checking to see whether a thousand years might have gone by on the other side of that wall while only ten have gone by on this side!?”

“I saw no harm in making inquiries,” he’d said. Then he’d gotten a look as if something else were on the tip of his tongue. Something mischievous. I had headed him off before he could say it:

“Oh. Is this anything to do with your crazy stories about the wandering ten-thousand-year math?”

When we’d been new fids, Orolo had once claimed that he had found an instance in the Chronicles where a gate somewhere had ground open and some avout had walked out of it claiming to be Ten-thousanders celebrating Apert. Which was ridiculous because avout in their current form had only existed for (at that time) 3682 years. So we’d reckoned that the whole purpose of the story had been to see if we had been paying any attention whatsoever to our history lessons. But perhaps the story had been meant to convey a deeper point.

“You can get a lot done in ten millennia if you put your mind to it,” Orolo had said. “What if you found a way to sever all causal links to the world extramuros?”

“That is utterly ridiculous. You are giving Incanter-like powers to these people.”

“But if one could do it, then one’s math would become a separate universe and its time would no longer be synchronized with the rest of the world’s. Causal Domain Shear would become possible-”

“Nice thought experiment,” I’d said. “Point taken. Thank you for the calca. But please tell me you don’t really expect to see evidence of CDS when the gates open!”

“It is what you don’t expect,” he’d said, “that most needs looking for.”

“Do you have, in your wigwams or tents or skyscrapers or wherever you live-”

“Trailers without wheels mostly,” said Artisan Quin.

“Very well. In those, is it common to have things that can think, but that are not human?”

“We did for a while, but they all stopped working and we threw them away.”

“Can you read? And by that I don’t just mean interpreting Logotype…”

“No one uses that any more,” said Quin. “You’re talking about the symbols on your underwear that tell you not to use bleach. That sort of thing.”

“We don’t have underwear, or bleach-just the bolt, the chord, and the sphere,” said Fraa Orolo, patting the length of cloth thrown over his head, the rope knotted around his waist, and the sphere under his bottom. This was a weak joke at our expense to set Quin at ease.

Quin stood up and tossed his long body in a way that made his jacket fly off. He was not a thick-built man but he had muscles from working. He whirled the jacket round to his front and used his thumbs to thrust out a sheaf of tags sewn into the back of the collar. I could see the logo of a company, which I recognized from ten years ago, though they had made it simpler. Below it was a grid of tiny pictures that moved. “Kinagrams. They obsoleted Logotype.”

I felt old: a new feeling for me.

Orolo had been curious until he’d seen the Kinagrams; now he looked disappointed. “Oh,” he said, in a mild and polite tone of voice, “you are talking bulshytt.”

I got embarrassed. Quin was amazed. Then his face turned red. It looked as if he were talking himself into being angry.

“Fraa Orolo didn’t say what you think!” I told Quin, and tried to punctuate it with a chuckle, which came out as a gasp. “It is an ancient Orth word.”

“It sounded a lot like-”

“I know! But Fraa Orolo has forgotten all about the word you are thinking of. It’s not what he meant.”

“What did he mean, then?”

Fraa Orolo was fascinated that Quin and I were talking about him as if he weren’t there.

“He means that there’s no real distinction between Kinagrams and Logotype.”

“But there is,” Quin said, “they are incompatible.” His face wasn’t red any more; he drew breath and thought about it for a minute. Finally he shrugged. “But I see what you mean. We could have gone on using Logotype.”

“Why do you suppose it became obsolete, then?” asked Orolo.

“So that the people who brought us Kinagrams could gain market share.”

Orolo frowned and considered this phrase. “That sounds like bulshytt too.”

“So that they could make money.”

“Very well. And how did those people achieve that goal?”

“By making it harder and harder to use Logotype and easier and easier to use Kinagrams.”

“How annoying. Why did the people not rise up in rebellion?”

“Over time we were led to believe that Kinagrams really were better. So, I guess you’re right. It really is bul-” But he stopped in mid-word.

“You can say it. It’s not a bad word.”

“Well, I won’t say it, because it feels wrong to say it here, in this place.”

“As you wish, Artisan Quin.”

“Where were we?” Quin asked, then answered his own question: “You were asking me if I could read, not these, but the frozen letters used to write Orth.” He nodded at my leaf, which was growing dark with just that sort of script.

“Yes.”

“I could if I had to, because my parents made me learn. But I don’t, because I never have to,” said Quin. “My son, now, he’s a different story.”

“His father made him learn?” Fraa Orolo put in.

Quin smiled. “Yes.”

“He reads books?”

“All the time.”

“His age?” Obviously this was not on the questionnaire.

“Eleven. And he hasn’t been burned at the stake yet.” Quin said that in a very serious way. I wondered if Fraa Orolo understood that Quin was making a joke-taking a dig at him. Orolo made no sign.

“You have criminals?”

“Of course.” But the mere fact that Quin responded in this way caused Orolo to jump to a new leaf of the questionnaire.

“How do you know?”

“What?!”

“You say of course there are criminals, but if you look at a particular person, how do you know whether or not he is a criminal? Are criminals branded? Tattooed? Locked up? Who decides who is and isn’t a criminal? Does a woman with shaved eyebrows say ‘you are a criminal’ and ring a silver bell? Or is it rather a man in a wig who strikes a block of wood with a hammer? Do you thrust the accused through a doughnut-shaped magnet? Or use a forked stick that twitches when it is brought near evil? Does an Emperor hand down the decision from his throne written in vermilion ink and sealed with black wax, or is it rather that the accused must walk barefoot across a griddle? Perhaps there is ubiquitous moving picture praxis-what you’d call speelycaptors-that know all, but their secrets may only be unlocked by a court of eunuchs each of whom has memorized part of a long number. Or perhaps a mob shows up and throws rocks at the suspect until he’s dead.”

“I can’t take you seriously,” Quin said. “You’ve only been in the concent, what, thirty years?”

Fraa Orolo sighed and looked at me. “Twenty-nine years, eleven months, three weeks, six days.”

“And it’s plain to see you are boning up for Apert-but you can’t really think that things have changed so much!”

Another look in my direction. “Artisan Quin,” said Fraa Orolo, after a pause to make his words hit harder, “this is anno three thousand, six hundred, and eighty-nine of the Reconstitution.”

“That’s what my calendar says too,” Quin affirmed.

“3690 is tomorrow. Not only the Unarian math, but we Decenarians as well, will celebrate Apert. According to the ancient rules, our gates will open. For ten days, we shall be free to go out, and visitors such as you shall be welcome to come in. Now, ten years hence, the Centenarian Gate will open for the first, and probably the last, time in my life.”

“When it closes, which side of that gate will you be on?” Quin asked.

I got embarrassed again, because I’d never dare ask such a question. But I was secretly delighted that Quin had asked it for me.

“If I am found worthy, I should very much like to be on the inside of it,” said Fraa Orolo, and then glanced at me with an amused look, as if he’d guessed my thoughts. “The point is that in nine or so years, I can expect to be summoned to the upper labyrinth, which separates my math from that of the Centenarians. There I shall find my way to a grate in a dark room, and on the other side of that grate shall be one of those Hundreders (unless they have all died, vanished, or turned into something else) who shall ask me questions that shall seem just as queer to me as mine do to you. For they must make preparations for their Apert just as we do for ours. In their books they have records of every judicial practice that they, and others in other concents, have heard of in the last thirty-seven-hundred-odd years. The list that I rattled off to you, a minute ago, is but a single paragraph from a book as thick as my arm. So even if you find it to be a ridiculous exercise, I should be most grateful if you’d simply describe to me how you choose your criminals.”

“Will my answer be entered in that book?”

“If it is a new answer, yes.”

“Well, we still have Magistrate Doctors who roam about at the new moon in sealed purple boxes…”

“Yes, those I remember.”

“But they weren’t coming round as often as we needed them-the Powers That Be weren’t doing a good job of protecting them and some got rolled down hills. Then the Powers That Be put up more speelycaptors.”

Fraa Orolo jumped to a new leaf. “Who has access to those?”

“We don’t know.”

Orolo began moving to yet another new leaf. But before he found it, Quin continued: “But if someone commits a bad enough crime, the Powers That Be clamp a thing on their spine that makes them sort of crippled, for a while. Later it falls off and then they are normal again.”

“Does it hurt?”

“No.”

A new page. “When you see someone wearing one of those devices, can you tell what crime they committed?”

“Yes, it says right on it, in Kinagrams.”

“Theft, assault, extortion?”

“Sure.”

“Sedition?”

Quin waited a long time before saying, “I’ve never seen that.”

“Heresy?”

“That would probably be handled by the Warden of Heaven.”

Fraa Orolo threw his hands up so high that his bolt fell away from his head and even bared one of his armpits. Then he brought them down again, the better to clamp them over his face. It was a sarcastic gesture that he liked to make in a chalk hall when a fid was being impossibly block-headed. Quin clearly took its meaning, and became embarrassed. He shifted back in his chair and pointed his chin at the ceiling, then lowered it again and looked at the window he was supposed to be mending. But there was something in Fraa Orolo’s huge gesture that was funny, and gave Quin the feeling that it was okay.

“All right,” Quin finally said, “I never thought of it like this, but now that you mention it, we have three systems…”

“The chaps in the purple boxes, the spine clamps, and this new thing that neither I nor Fraa Erasmas has ever heard of called the Warden of Heaven,” said Fraa Orolo, and began pushing through many leaves of his questionnaire-digging deep.

Something had occurred to Artisan Quin. “I never mentioned them because I thought you’d know all about them!”

“Because,” Fraa Orolo said, finding the page he’d been looking for, and scanning it, “they claimed that they came from the concent…bringing the enlightenment of the mathic world to a worthy few.”

“Yeah. Didn’t they?”

“No. They didn’t.” Seeing just how taken aback Quin was, Orolo continued: “This sort of thing happens every few hundred years. Some charlatan will appear and make a claim on Sæcular Power based on an association with the mathic world-which happens to be fraudulent.”

I knew the answer to the following question before I blurted it out: “Does Artisan Flec-is he a follower, a disciple, of the Warden of Heaven?”

Quin and Orolo both looked at me, agog for different reasons. “Yes,” Quin said. “He listens to their casts while he works.”

“That’s why he made a speely of Provener,” I said. “Because this Warden of Heaven claims to be part of us. If there’s anything mysterious or…well, magnificent about this place, why, that just makes the Warden of Heaven seem that much bigger and more powerful. And to the extent that Artisan Flec is a disciple of the Warden of Heaven, he feels some of that belongs to him.”

Orolo said nothing, which made me embarrassed at the time. When I thought about it later, though, I understood that he didn’t need to say anything because what I’d said was obviously true.

Quin was looking a little confused. “Flec didn’t make a speely.”

“I beg your pardon?” I said.

Fraa Orolo was still distracted, thinking about the Warden of Heaven.

“They wouldn’t allow it. His speelycaptor was too good,” Quin explained.

Being old and wise, Fraa Orolo went rigid, pursed his lips, and looked uneasy. Being neither, I said: “What on earth does that mean?”

Fraa Orolo’s hand came down on my wrist and prevented me from writing any more. And I suspect that his other hand wanted to clamp down on Quin’s mouth. Quin went on, “The Eagle-Rez, the SteadiHand, the DynaZoom-put those all together, and it could have seen straight across into the other parts of your Mynster, even through the screens. Or at least that’s what he was told by the-”

“Artisan Quin!” Fraa Orolo trumpeted, loud enough to draw looks from everyone else in the library. Then he made his voice quite low: “I am afraid you are about to tell us something that your friend Flec learned from talking to the Ita. And I must remind you that such a thing is not allowed under our Discipline.”

“Sorry,” Quin said. “It’s confusing.”

“I know it is.”

“All right. Forget about the speelycaptor. I’m sorry. Where were we?”

“We were talking about the Warden of Heaven,” Fraa Orolo said, relaxing a little, and finally letting go my wrist. “And as far as I’m concerned, the only thing we need to establish is whether he is a Throwback-turned-Mystagogue, or a Bottle Shaker, as the former can be quite dangerous.”