Anathem

“I can puzzle out ‘Throwback-turned-Mystagogue,’” I told Fraa Orolo later. I was chopping carrots in the Refectory kitchen, and he was eating them. “And I can even guess why they are dangerous: because they’re angry, they want to come back to the place that Anathematized them, and even the score.”

“Yes, and that’s why Quin and I spent the whole afternoon with the Warden Fendant.”

“But what’s a Bottle Shaker?”

“Imagine a witch doctor in a society that doesn’t know how to make glass. A bottle washes up on the shore. It has amazing properties. He puts it on a stick and waves it around and convinces his fellows that he has got some of those amazing properties himself.”

“So Bottle Shakers aren’t dangerous?”

“No. Too easily impressed.”

“What of the slines who ate Saunt Bly’s liver? Apparently they weren’t so impressed.”

To hide a smile, Fraa Orolo pretended to inspect a potato. “The point is well taken, but remember that Saunt Bly was living alone on a butte. The very fact of his having been Thrown Back separated him from the artifacts and auts that are most impressive to Bottle Shaker-producing societies.”

“So what did you and the Warden Fendant decide?”

Fraa Orolo glanced around in a way that made it obvious I should have been more discreet.

“Expect more precautions at Apert.”

I lowered my voice. “So, the Sæcular Power will send…I don’t know…?”

“Robots with stun guns? Echelons of horse archers? Cylinders of sleeping gas?”

“I guess so.”

“That depends on to what extent the Warden of Heaven has become the same as the Panjandrums,” Fraa Orolo said. He liked to call the Sæcular Power the Panjandrums. “And that is very difficult for us to make out. Obviously, I can’t make heads or tails of it. It is just the kind of thing for which the office of Warden Fendant was created, and I’m certain that Fraa Delrakhones is working the problem as we speak.”

“Could it lead to…you know…”

“A Sack? Local or general? I certainly don’t think that this is going to culminate in Number Four. Fraa Delrakhones would have heard rumblings from other Wardens Fendant. Even a local sack is most improbable. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a bit of roughhousing on Tenth Night; but that’s why we prepare for Apert by moving all of the stuff we really care about to the labyrinths.”

“You said to Quin that radical changes extramuros had twice culminated in Sacks,” I reminded him.

Fraa Orolo let a moment go by and said, “Yes?” Then, before I could go on, he put on the merry-fraa face that he used when he was trying to humor a chalk hall full of bored fids. “You’re not actually worrying about Number Four, are you?”

I murdered a carrot and said Diax’s Rake three times under my breath.

“Three Sacks-General in 3700 years is not bad,” he pointed out. “The statistics for the Sæcular world are far more alarming.”

“I was worrying about it a little bit,” I said. “But that is not what I was going to ask before you went Kefedokhles on me.”

Orolo said nothing, perhaps because I was gripping a large knife. I was tired and testy. Earlier, I had punched in my sphere to make it a bushel basket and ventured into the tangles nearest the Cloister, only to find they’d already been stripped of produce. To find all the stuff we needed to make the stew, I’d had to cross the river and ransack some of the tangles between it and the wall.

I snatched a hard-earned carrot and aimed it at the sky. “You have only taught me of the stars,” I said. “History I have learned from others-mostly from Fraa Corlandin.”

“He probably told you that the Sacks were our fault,” said Orolo-using our, I noted, in a very elastic way, to mean every avout all the way back to Ma Cartas.

Sometimes, when I was chatting with Thistlehead, he would reach out and give me a little push on the collarbone, and just like that I’d be flailing my arms, aware that one more push would topple me. It was Lio’s charming way of letting me know that he had noticed I was standing in the wrong way, according to his books of Vale-lore. I thought it nonsense. But my body always seemed to agree with Fraa Lio, because it would over-react. Once, in trying to recover my balance, I had pulled a muscle deep in my back that had hurt for three weeks.

Fraa Orolo’s last sentence touched my mind in a similar way. And in a similar way, I over-reacted. My face flushed and my heart beat faster. It was just like the moment in a dialog when Thelenes has tricked his interlocutor into saying something stupid and is about to begin slicing him up like a carrot on a plank.

“Each Sack was followed by a reform, was it not?” I said.

“Let us Rake your sentence, and say that each Sack led to changes in the maths that are still observed to this day.”

That Fraa Orolo was now talking in this style confirmed that we were in dialog. The other fraas stopped peeling potatoes and chopping herbs, and gathered around to watch me get planed.

“All right, call them whatever you wish,” I said, and then snorted, because I knew I had left myself open; this was the equivalent of me falling on my arse after one little nudge from Fraa Lio. I should never have brought up Kefedokhles. I was going to pay for that.

I couldn’t stop myself from shooting a glance out the window. The kitchen faced south into an herb garden that filled most of the space between it and the closest of the tangles-the ones cultivated by the very oldest fraas and suurs, so that they wouldn’t have to walk very far to get their chores done. The roof on that side had a deep overhanging eave to prevent sun from shining in and making the kitchen even hotter than it already was. Suur Tulia and Suur Ala were sitting together in the shade of that eave, directly beneath the window, cutting up tires to make sandals. I didn’t want Tulia to hear me get planed because I had a crush on her, and I didn’t want Ala to hear it because she would enjoy it so much. Fortunately, they were explaining something to each other as usual, and had no idea what was happening in here.

“Call them whatever you wish? What a curious thing to say, Fid Erasmas,” Orolo said. “Let me see…may I call them carrots or floor-tiles?” Titters flew out from all around, like sparrows flushed from a belfry.

“No, Pa Orolo, it would not make sense to say that each Sack was followed by a carrot.”

“Why not, Fid Erasmas?”

“Because the word carrot has a meaning different from reform or change in the maths.”

“So because words have this remarkable property of possessing specific meanings, we must take care to use the correct ones? Is that a just statement of what you have said, or am I in error?”

“It is correct, Pa Orolo.”

“Perhaps some of the others, who have learned so much from the New Circle and the Reformed Old Faanians, have noted some error in this, and would like to correct us.” And, with the placid eye of a viper tasting the air, Fraa Orolo looked about at the half-dozen fids who had encircled us.

No one moved.

“Very well, no one here wishes to support the novel hypothesis of Saunt Proc. We may continue under the assumption that words mean things. What is the difference between saying that the Sacks were followed by reforms, and saying that they were followed by changes in the maths?”

“I suppose it has to do with the connotations of the word reform,” I said. For I had given up and was willing to let myself be planed, not because I liked it but because it was so unusual for Fraa Orolo to expose his views about anything other than stars and planets.

“Ah, perhaps you could elaborate on that, for I am not gifted with your faculty for words, Fid Erasmas, and would be chagrined if I failed to follow your argument.”

“Very well, Pa Orolo. To say that there were changes seems like a more Diaxan phrasing-raked clean of subjective emotional judgments-whereas, when we say reforms, it gives the feeling that something was wrong with how the maths were run before, and that-”

“We deserved to be sacked? The Panjandrums needed to come in and mend us?”

“When you put it that way, Pa Orolo, and in that tone of voice, you seem to suggest that the changes that were made, need not have been-that they were forced on us wrongly by the Sæcular Power.” I stumbled over a few words, because I was excited. I had glimpsed a way to corner Orolo. For those reforms-those changes-were as fundamental to the maths as going to Provener every day, and he could hardly take a stand against them.

But Fraa Orolo only shook his head sadly, as if he could scarcely believe what thin gruel was being spooned out to us in the chalk halls. “You need to review the S?culum of Saunt Cartas.”

Avout who spent a lot of time peering through telescopes were known for taking an eccentric approach to the study of history, and so I did not laugh at this. A few of the others exchanged smirks.

“Pa Orolo, I read it last year.”

“What you read was probably selections from a translation into Middle Orth. Many of those translations were influenced by a sort of ur-Procian mentality that took hold during the Old Mathic Age, not long before the rise of the Mystagogues. You giggle, but it is obvious once you begin to notice it. Certain bits of it they translate poorly, because they are skittish about what it means; then, when they get around to choosing selections, they leave those bits out because they’re ashamed of them. Instead you should go to the effort of reading Cartas in the original. It is not as difficult to follow Old Orth as some would have you believe.”

“And when I do this, what shall I learn?”

“That in the very founding document of the mathic world, Saunt Cartas herself emphasizes that it is not an accommodation to the S?culum but a kind of opposition to it. A counterbalance.”

“The Concent-as-fortress mentality?” suggested one of the listeners-trying to bait Orolo.

“That is not a designation I love,” said Orolo, “but if I hold forth on that, the stew will never get made, and we’ll soon have two hundred and ninety-five hungry avout calling for our heads. Suffice it to say, Fid Erasmas, that Saunt Cartas would never have accepted the notion that the Sæcular Power can or should ‘reform’ the maths. But she would have admitted that it does have the power to wreak changes on us.”