Anathem

Embarrassment is something I can feel in my flesh, like a handful of sun-warmed mud clapped on my head.

I suffer from attention surplus disorder, Fraa Orolo liked to say, as if it were funny.

I could have found my way with my eyes closed by letting my feet read the memory worn into it by those gone before.

Lio tumbled backward as if I’d smacked him with a quarter-staff. His feet flew up and spun back to find purchase on the roots of the apple tree.

Lio worried such terms loose from old books of vlor-as if pulling dragon’s teeth from a fossil jaw.

Half of them (the Fendant gargoyles) gazed outward, the other half (the Regulant gargoyles) bent their scaly necks and aimed their pointy ears and slitted eyes into the concent spread below.

Jesry had dragged Lio to safety as he was attempting to set a counter-counterfire to contain a system of counterfires that was supposed to be containing the original fire but that had gotten out of hand.

The screens were made dark on the nave side and light on the chancel side, so that it was easy to see into the chancel but impossible to see beyond it, creating the illusion that each nave stood alone, and owned the chancel.

Then we filed out and, like grains of sugar dropped in a mug of tea, dissolved in a vast space.

He even inspired them to stop consuming blithe, whereupon they became surly, killed him, and ate his liver out of a misconception that this was where he did his thinking.

Our combined strength could not overcome the static friction of all the bearings and gears between us and the sprocket hundreds of feet above from which the chain and the weight depended.

But then, sort of as when you are looking at some geometric shape that looks like a tangle having no order at all, and you rotate it just a tiny bit, and suddenly all its planes and vertices come into alignment and you see what it is, all of those voices fell in together over the course of a few measures and collapsed into one pure tone.

As I wound the clock on that day I was wondering what it would be like to climb up to the Warden Fendant’s ledge and jump off.

“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.”

“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.”

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?

“Some charlatan will appear and make a claim on Sæcular Power based on an association with the mathic world—which happens to be fraudulent.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

Even though they were not here yet, they seemed to surround us like ghosts, which made me seem older by contrast.

She reacted as if I had hit her with a spitball from across a crowded chalk hall, swiveling her head to strafe me with her eyes.

“It depicts us as clowns,” Fraa Ostabon said, a little brusquely. “But… clowns with a sinister aspect.”

They’ll be curious about our knowledge, impressed by us, but patronizing—certain that we must be subordinated to intuitive, common-sense leaders.

It was dangerous because it raised people’s expectations to the point of delirium, and drew many pilgrims and much attention.

I had the upsight that the things Fraa Orolo said—even when they caused me embarrassment or outright pain—never made me wrestle with my bolt in the night-time in the way that these words from Fraa Corlandin had.

The marble, crystal, steel, and lapis spheres that represented the planets had moved to positions that were at odds with what Fraa Orolo could plainly see even in the smallest of telescopes.

Arsibalt and I pleated Holbane’s bolt and then backed away from each other as Holbane made it three times as long and much thinner.

To hear that melody now penetrated so deep into my brain that it literally threw me off balance, and I leaned into another fraa: Lio, who for once did not use it as an excuse to flip me over his hipbone and slam me to the ground, but rather pushed me back up straight, as if I were a crooked ikon.

During some eras it would grow and engulf our walls, and office workers in skyscrapers would gaze down on the tops of our bastions.

The most interesting moment was when the gap between the gates grew just wide enough to admit a single person. Who would it be? Male or female, old or young, carrying an assault rifle, a baby, a chest of gold, or a backpack bomb?

The woman, unencumbered, moved faster, but in a gait that looked all wrong until I recollected that women extramuros wore shoes that made them walk so.

Apparently, this woman had been told by some ignorant person that we’d give her money for the baby.

Anyway, the styles had changed quite a bit, and so Jesry and I would stop talking and stare whenever a particularly strange or gaudy fetch went by.

Beneath a grey film of congealed exhaust, faded Kinagrams fidgeted like maggots trapped in a garbage bag.

You and I were born too early to be Hundreders and too late to be Thousanders.

“You don’t want to end up as a knee-hugger,” I said. “That is correct. How does that work? Why some, but not others?”

Inside the math, it didn’t matter that he had come from burgers and I had come from slines. But as soon as we had stepped out of the Decade Gate, this fact had been released, like a bubble of swamp gas deep in dark water.

She ended by exhaling sharply, dropping her shoulders, setting her chin, and putting on a smile that I guessed was meant to be obviously fake.

Now I had an upsight, which was that he’d been expecting his family to be standing in front of the gate to meet him.

Tendrils of wire and of artfully bent tubing had grown over these machines like ivy exploring a boulder, and my eye followed them to concentrations where I was sometimes surprised to see a human being in a dark coverall.

As Jesry and I drew closer, we perceived it as a giant cube of red amber with two black forms trapped in it: not insects but humans.

His long black beard avalanched down his chest as his mouth fell open.

They made glinting music as they found their way to the floor, and some left corkscrews of fine smoke along their paths.

She seemed as though she could sleep standing up, like a horse.

So bossy, so stern a person was Suur Ala that, until this moment, I had feared that she and Cord were going to fall upon each other like two cats in a pillowcase.

Where anyone else in the world would construct a wall, they’d fill in the space with a system of arches and tracery.

The walls were a fractal foam of hand-carved, interlocking stone.

They speak only in a very conservative ancient version of Orth. And we also have ways to communicate without speech.

I took a moment to feel the chain. It was like a trickle of ice water over my fingers.

She traced her finger up the side of the tablet a few times, running it forward thousands of years in a second.

One sort of glib explanation I heard once was that Rhetors could change the past, and were glad to do it, but Incanters could change the future—and were reluctant.

Each tread was a slab of rock cantilevered straight out from the side of the building: a daring design, and one that required some daring from anyone who would climb it, since there was no railing.

'Clesthyra-that’s the monster from ancient mythology that could look in all directions at once.'

Fraa Lio perfected a new wrap that made him look like a parcel that had fallen from a mail train, but that could not under any circumstances be pulled over the face by a foe.

The bullets poked it nearly inside-out and knocked it back like a batted balloon.

The sky had hurled itself against the mountains like a sea attacking a stony headland, and spent its cold energy in half an hour.

I was surprised by a little sunrise above the mountains: the ray, sweeping invisibly up through empty sky, had found a couple of small wispy clouds and set them alight, like balls of wool flung into a fire.

When Orolo answered-which he did only after a long pause-it was in a voice that was wound up tight.

They judged theorical proofs not logically but aesthetically.

Seventeen years ago, Tulia had been found at the Day Gate, wrapped in newspapers and nestled in a beer cooler with the lid ripped off.

The current sline fashion was to wear a garment evolved from an athletic jersey (bright, with numerals on the back) but oversized, so that shoulder seams hung around the elbows, and extremely long—descending all the way to the knee.

This wedge of granite was their tumulus. The stuff that they had gathered was sent up to the Thousanders.

As if to shield himself from the vision, he had raised a hand, but could not resist the temptation to peek over it.

Tantus, fascinated, had asked him a number of questions on that theme, then drew the Imperial sword and plunged it into the sculptor’s heart so that he would never be able to undermine his own work of art by answering the question.

What her sister Deat had misinterpreted as a pyramid in heaven was actually a glimpse of an isosceles triangle: not a crude and inaccurate representation of one, such as Cnous drew on his tablet with ruler and compass, but a pure theorical object of which one could make absolute statements.

Diax said something that is still very important to us, which is that you should not believe a thing only because you like to believe it.

Theors had to be sought out as small figures in the deep background, reclining on the steps of the Library or going into the Capitol to spill wise counsel into the dead ears of the high and mighty.

He looked as if I’d poked him in the eye. “What kind of way to begin a sentence is that? ‘I think many scholars would agree…’ Why don’t you just say what you mean?”

“It appears that we have two honored guests from the Inquisition,” he said. I looked across the chancel and recognized the faces of the man and woman I’d been talking to earlier.

“You’d think that after all this time someone might have invented…oh, say… the wheel,” Arsibalt mentioned at one point, as we were wrestling with a twelve-foot-long monster that looked like it might have stopped spears during the Old Mathic Age.

“I would guess that they happened to come in from the aerodrome just as your tour was beginning, and decided on the spur of the moment to tag along so that they could view the statues in the Rotunda, which anyone would want to see.”

It is inherent in the mentality of extramuros bulshytt-talkers that they are more prone than anyone else to taking offense (or pretending to) when their bulshytt is pointed out to them.

You might say that the difference between us and you is that we have been infected by a vision of…another world.

As they moved to and fro, crossing over one another’s paths and exchanging places while traversing in front of the high table, they were acting out a calculation on the curvature of a four-dimensional manifold.

“If this all seems ambiguous, that’s because it is; and if that troubles you, you’d hate it here; but if it gives you a feeling of relief, then you are in the right place and might consider staying.”

“Uh huh,” Dath said, gobbling a vertex from his serving.

It was as if they ceased in this moment to be citizens of one country and became citizens of another.

Lio’s bolt slapped down on top of Number 86 and draped him, making him look like a ghost.

His spine-clamp exploded in light, flashing alternately red and blue. He uttered a common profanity. He dropped the gun and collapsed.

But Suur Trestanas was—I realized too late—jealous of me for this.

Boredom is a mask that frustration wears. What better place to savor the truth of Fraa Orolo’s saying than a penance cell of the Warden Regulant?

The punishment lay in knowing that you were putting all of that effort into letting a kind of intellectual poison infiltrate your brain to its very roots.

I could see the way in which a given rope’s movement was conditioned by what its neighbors had done on the previous beats.

Like a fraa who wakes in his cell in the hours before dawn smelling smoke, and who knows from this that a slow fire must have been smoldering and gathering heat for many hours while he slumbered in oblivion, I felt not only alarm but also shame at my own slowness.

As I absorbed that, a gasp and then a deep moan welled up from the floor of the chancel: the gasp, I reckoned, from most of the avout, and the moan from the Hundreders who were losing their brother forever.

He had chosen this moment to tilt his head back and gaze straight up. And why not? It was the last time he would ever look on this place.

The tablet was a featureless disk, like the blank used for grinding a telescope mirror, but darker-as if cast in obsidian.

It was a thousand feet away, but it felt as immediate as a slap in the face.

I’d never thought I’d be happy to see the place.

In my gloomier moments I wondered if throwing the Book at me had been a sort of recruiting tactic on the part of Suur Trestanas-a way of forcing me to join some non-Edharian order and thereby pushing me down the path that would lead to my toiling in the Primate’s compound as a lesser hierarch, always under someone’s thumb.

“It’s more important that I do this than that I not be Thrown Back,” I said. Which was pretty stupid, but I was feeling rebellious and not thinking very hard.

I had a choice: move, and spend the next two months with my arm in a sling, or not move. I chose not to move.

Each nucleus was an archive, vaster than the Great Library of Baz, storing codes for shaping almost every molecule nature had ever produced that left an impression on the human olfactory system.

The casks, like musical instruments, resonated in sympathy with the human voice, and so wine that had been stored in a vault used for choir rehearsals would taste different from that stashed along the walls of a dining room.

“Because it’s not what Orolo wants. He says he needs you as part of his team.”

It’s like the rest of us became adults while you were up there—and you didn’t.

All those blank pages made an uproar as I sloshed through them, searching for one especially grand tree I’d always loved to climb.

Islands of luxury that must make Saunt Cartas roll over in her chalcedony sarcophagus.

There was another reason you needed an avocation: so that if you turned out to be incapable of doing anything else, you could give up on books and chalk halls and dialog and work as a sort of laborer for the rest of your life.

“That damned luminous orb!” Orolo spat. Then something crossed his mind. “But you know that our equipment can see some things during the daytime, if they are very bright.”

“My arm was acted on by a force of unknown origin!” he stated.

'Yeah! It’s like knowing all of the theorics only makes us stupider!' he laughed excitedly, and cast a theatrical glance over his shoulder, as if we were up to something incredibly mischievous.

At Saunt Rambalf’s, a mass suicide that had taken place only moments earlier. At Saunt Terramore’s, nothing at all-not even human remains.

As soon as you open the door wide enough to admit pink nerve-gas-farting dragons, you have let in all of those other possibilities as well.

Jesry snapped back, and looked around at me, Lio, and Arsibalt, as if he’d just been mugged, and needed witnesses.

And somehow, toward the end, it came out that he believed that the sun revolved around Arbre.

I saw now that in my desire to know theorics I had taken shortcuts that, just like shortcuts on a map, turned out to be longcuts.

The sound of them furiously explaining things to each other gave the rest of us headaches.

“I got the idea during Apert from seeing how weeds and even trees are invading the town. Taking it back from humans so slowly that the humans don’t notice.”

To spend the summer doing something absolutely ridiculous would flaunt the fact that I had no such intentions.

“Where did you get that?” I demanded, now sounding no older than Barb. Rotha’s hand flitted across the leaf and immortalized it.

It says in your journal that Fraa Orolo’s hand came down on your wrist just after that, and stopped you from writing. Why?

“Where were you on the ninth night of Apert?” I thought for a minute, and frowned. “That’s one of those simple-sounding questions that is hard for a normal person to answer.”

“Yes,” he said, and then winked. “Or perhaps not.”

I was about halfway to the starhenge, high up behind the face of the clock, when I first heard the word Anathem.

Why did I cry out “No!” when I’d known it all along? Not out of disbelief. It was an objection. A refusal. A declaration of war.

His skinny white ankles were lost in a pair of old black work boots and he had to shuffle lest they fall off.

The story of how Orolo had come to be Thrown Back had to be reconstructed over the next few weeks, like a skull in an archaeological dig being fitted together one shard at a time.

The orientation of the M & M suggested that Orolo had been using it to take pictures of an object in a polar orbit, which was unlikely in a natural object.

“Whatever it was that he had seen, he knew that it was a Sæcular event and that the hierarchs would make him stop looking at it as soon as they found out. That wouldn’t have been true if it was just a rock.”

The grief that had hit me at the moment Statho had called Orolo’s name was still with me all the time, but I had learned that it could transform in a flash to anger.

It was a real accomplishment, in a way, to have left such a mess under a building so small.

We cut a circle from each page until we had formed a cavity in the heart of this tome that was large enough to swallow the photomnemonic tablet.

Our knowledge doesn’t make us better or wiser. We can be just as nasty as those slines that beat up Lio and Arsibalt for the fun of it.

The first time I saw this I laughed out loud because it made my elbow look as big as the moon, and by zooming in on it I could see a mole and count the hairs and freckles.

I could see all the way up into his nostrils and count the hairs; I could see the tiny veins in his eyeballs and the striations in his iris.

And I’d found that taking such action was the only way to transmute my anger back into grief.

It was a black disk etched with thousands of fine concentric arcs, each of which was the track made by a particular star or planet as Arbre spun beneath it.

But still it stung to risk so much and do so much work to get a result, only to be told it was nothing new.

“Someone out there in the Sæcular world must have said ‘Paphlagon’s our man—yank him, and bring him to us!’”

'But it’s rather difficult when Arsibalt’s using them as a semaphore.'

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

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.

The Ita must make decisions as to what they will pass on and what they will withhold.

“If you can’t test it, it’s not theorics—it’s metatheorics. A branch of philosophy.”

There might as well be, but most of it gets spent on pornography, sugar water, and bombs.

It always seemed as if they were taunting us.

But the entire time that he’s eating, he’s staring directly into the sun. Sammann is watching the sun.

The only criterion for a news item to make it into a summary was that it still had to seem interesting.

“If Suur Trestanas finds it, it’ll go back to being ‘your’ tablet,” Tulia said.

Ala was squared off against the three of us, scanning our faces with those searchlight eyes.

Arsibalt must be in a state of animalistic terror.

Now that my eyes had adjusted to the light I could see that Ala had stretched her chord across the doorway at ankle level and tied it off between a couple of chairs flanking the exit.

I leaned back against the wall and let my head thud back as if attempting to escape from my own, hideously guilty skin.

I had made a mess inside of someone else’s soul at a moment when that soul had been open to me.

Something brushed past me-a bat? But the next time I took a count of persons in the room-which was much later-there were only two of us.

A pinprick of light, brighter than the sun, gone before I could be certain it was there.

“I think it’s hiding,” I said. “If it did what it just did in the night sky, anyone could see it with the naked eye.”

Her agility in jumping between the love topic and the alien spacecraft was making me dizzy. Or perhaps giddy.

I needed to sit there alone for a while and stare into the black just to settle my thoughts.

“Voco,” he announced, “the Sæcular Power will Evoke one of us.”

Jesry turned and socked me on the shoulder, hard enough to leave a charley horse that would still ache three days later. Something to remember him by.

“This is where it would spit out the atomic bombs, one after another.”

It takes time and effort to tear down and stow away an idea you were that excited about.

“Like a fugitive who walks in a river not to leave footprints,” Barb put in.

I was still feeling bad that I’d just stood there like a stunned animal while she’d walked out of my life.

“Did some two-headed, eight-limbed alien draw the same equations on the equivalent of a slate on another planet a thousand years ago?”

It was a shade of red that was most un-sun-like. It had a grainy, sparkly quality.

“I feel like a fool,” Arsibalt said. “When I think of all the things I’ve worried about and been afraid of in my life—and now it’s plain that I’ve been scared of the wrong things.”

The Thousanders shook the Mynster with a mighty croaking bass line, so deep you felt more than heard it.

“The Powers That Be must be pissing their pants,” he said, “or whatever they wear nowadays.”

“What principle explains the powers imputed by this document to the Dynaglide lubri-strip?” he asked. “Is it permanent, or ablative?”

“Topology is destiny,” he said, and put the drawers on. One leg at a time.

“No,” said Fraa Jad, “they are probably telling us that they have figured out that Edhar, Rambalf, and Tredegarh are where the Sæcular Power stored all of the nuclear waste.”

“Yes, it’s crazy for me to get fired because of a decision you made without my knowledge. But no, in a way it’s not, because I’m weird here.”

“Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs,” I said. “We have a protractor.”

The bells of Provener flipped switches in my brain, as if I were one of those poor dogs that Saunts of old would wire up for psychological experiments.

So through no rational process whatsoever I was the leader. And I had no idea what I was going to say.

The novel sight of a fraa touching anIta broke the others’ concentration for a moment.

Inside the concent it was fine to admit ignorance, because that was the first step on the road to truth. Out here, it just gave people like Crade an opening to seize power.

Ganelial Crade sprayed us with loose rocks as he gunned his fetch out into the open.

It almost would have been faster to drive directly over the earth than to pick our way over this crazed puzzle of jagged slabs.

“I’m serious,” Arsibalt said. “Sconism is named after the little tea-cakes.”

I felt as I would’ve if we’d been on a mountain track with a thousand-foot cliff to one side, which Beller could have spilled us into with a twitch of the controls.

“Not God,” Arsibalt said, “not a God that any ark would recognize.”

It could have been an alien life form, adapted to live in the vacuum of space, that shot bombs out of a sphincter.

The frame of this ship was just a network of thirty shock absorbers that came together at a dozen spherical vertices.

And yet they were so close to our letters that this alphabet seemed almost like a sib of ours. Some of them were Bazian letters turned upside-down or reflected in a mirror.

“An intuition of the numenous,” Fraa Jad hazarded, “combined with a sense of dread.”

I went to his vineyard one night while he was alone, cursing at his grapes, and told him this-told him I had stumbled across it while reviewing logs of routine mail-protocol traffic.

That was what Anathem did: killed an avout without damaging the body.

The concept of a retreat didn’t make sense to me until I realized that it was how I lived my entire life.

“Wait a minute, you think that they are kills?” Lio shrugged.

“He was entrusting us with his life,” Lio said. “Haven’t you noticed how he was sizing everyone up today? He chose us, my fraa.”

Fraa Jad handled the drone, and I could swear he made the silverware buzz on the tables.

“Look at that fly crawling around on the table,” Arsibalt said. “No, don’t shoo it away. Just look at it. The size of its eyes.”

“How?” This was the sound of Arsibalt’s trap closing on his leg.

“Our brains are flies, bats, and worms that clumped together for mutual advantage. These parts of our brains are talking to each other all the time.”

“I think it is from another cosmos,” he said, “and that is why they Evoked Paphlagon.”

I got the idea—which might have been just my imagination—that Fraa Jad was singing a cosmographical chant: a requiem for the stars that were being swallowed up in the dawn.

I didn’t think Fraa Jad had been up all night chanting just because he was a music lover. He was doing something.

A minute after that, we were no longer able to hear the shouting inside the ark, just the rush of a dry crackling wind coming at us from across the desert, carrying the sharp perfume of the tough resinous plants that grew down there.

That kind of diagram is an assertion that information about theorical forms can get to our cosmos from the HTW, and cause measurable effects here.

It’s a tiling problem, and it dates all the way back to the Temple of Orithena.

Some have gone so far as to lodge the accusation that the Edharians are a sham—a false front whose real purpose is to act as a host body for an infestation of Teglon-worshippers.

The stone—synthetic and natural—was stained a deep ochre by the rust of all the metal structures that had been here at one time or another.

We saw it as a miniature cloister. All vestiges of the Sæcular had been carefully scrubbed away; all that remained was the ancient, stained stone, and a few necessaries, all hand-made.

The door opened, and there was violence. Not prolonged—it was finished in a second—and not severe.

“We shall attend the picnic,” Fraa Jad announced, pronouncing the Fluccish word with tweezers.

“Then keep going north until you understand it,” Fraa Jad said.

I was much more at ease sitting next to my sib, staring out the windscreen, my sole responsibility being to chase a wild fraa across the waste.

“That’s right,” Cord said, “we’re the girl Ita and if you don’t do what we say, we’re going to Throw the Book at you!”

I just kept asking myself: if fate had it that we’d never see each other again, what would I need to say to her?

Seeing it while I heard the lament, I felt what I can only describe as patriotism for my planet.

I kept watching to see what happened next, but instead the speely cycled back and showed the baby drop two more times in slow motion.

Not for the first time I got the feeling that we avout were children and the Ita, far from being a subservient caste, were our minders.

I thought it was just a few eccentric fraas with shovels and wheelbarrows, though.

They had no records of us, no jurisdiction over us, no responsibility for us; they could not draft us into their armies, levy taxes on us, or even step through our gates except at Apert.

The ice cap separated the two even more absolutely than an ocean would have, and no normal person ever traveled between them that way.

The speed with which Fraa Jad had recognized this hole in the ground suggested that he, and presumably the other Millenarians, knew a lot about it.

“The filters tell me that a lot has been posted in that vein,” Sammann said, “as you appear to know very well. Sorting it out is difficult. When I see such a pattern emerging in the filter interface, my gut tells me that most of it is probably crap.”

“Yul is a here-” Gnel began, and stopped himself before he had got to the end of the word. “An apostate.”

I could only imagine what she’d think of me at that time, reading this yellowed document written by a boy not yet twenty years of age.

If Arbre is only five thousand years old-if all the rocks in that canyon have fallen down in that short a time-I should have seen some rocks fall.

The people who’d made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story.

“In a few days,” he said, “that might be a wise place to be.”

But the more clever the praxis became, the less people understood it and the more dependent they became on us—and they didn’t like that at all.

‘Their electrical systems could be disabled by a burst of whozamajigger fields.’

I’d seen pictures of factories on tank treads that rolled across the north and engulfed whole city blocks at a time, treating the fabric of the ruins just as a mining robot would an ore-rich hill, grinding the buildings to rubble and sorting the shards according to density.

The snow-piles along the sides of the road grew higher and blacker until our way became a carbon-black slit trench twenty feet deep, crammed with drummons moving about as fast as a healthy person could walk.

The tires of the lumber drummon didn’t suddenly get un-worn. The paperwork at the lumberyard didn’t vanish from the files. But now there is a conflict.

The locomotive looked like one of those city-eating scrap processors: a power plant and a village of housing modules built on a bridge that spanned the interval between two colossal tracks.

The toilet was a hole in the floor covered, when not used, by a trapdoor weighed down with slugs of scrap iron so that arctic gales wouldn’t blow it open.

The information we trade in is noisy and ambiguous and suggestive. Often it’s images or acoustical signatures instead of words.

Extras swagger and slouch. They walk like they own the place. Avout—and Ita—are more self-contained.

That is disheartening, because of all the iconographies, the ones based on conspiracy theories are the hardest to root out.

To us you’re like people who’ve put out your own eyes and are now trying to explore a new continent.

He had departed for the north only a couple of days before we had—the morning after the lasers had shone down upon the Three Inviolates.

Like a litter of cubs following their mother, three much smaller sledge trains were now shadowing us on that side.

A glowing screen was mounted above it, showing a jagged trace that scrolled horizontally as we moved: a sonic.

I set my catalytic heater to the lowest power level that would keep my digits alive, folded my arms, propped my legs up on my pack, slumped down on the wooden bench, and tried not to think about how slowly time was passing.

Brajj hurled a tent-flap aside to flood our sledge with grey light, bright but directionless.

They were looking at a black snake, ten miles long, wreathed in steam, slithering up the valley toward the mountains: a convoy of heavy vehicles, jammed nose to tail.

The tractor was fifty feet away from us and picking up speed. The hitch that had linked it to our sledge was dragging on the snow behind it.

Frost grew with visible speed on our face-masks as we talked.

The thought hit me like a snowball in the nose. I’d been out of the concent for a little more than two weeks, eating extramuros food the whole time.

But for better or worse I was roped up to them and couldn’t cut myself free without endangering their lives and mine; I had to wait for them to pull the ripcord.

I felt like reeling him in and smacking him.

Then there was nothing under my toes. Nothing under my ankles. Nothing under my knees. My hips. The rope jerked me straight down with the weight of three men.

It had been severed at exactly the point where the blade of his sticker would have intercepted it in a moment of panic-or of calculation.

In the winter we told the fibers in our bolts to coil up.

Looking down at it, I verified that it was indeed the toboggan, wedged at an angle between the crevasse walls like a stick thrust between a monster’s jaws.

He screamed and cried out to his mother and his deity as we were doing this. I took that as a good sign because he was seeming more alert.

The rope that had connected us had fallen victim to his sticker.

Finally I remembered that I was extramuros, where the old literal meaning of harrowing had been forgotten thousands of years ago, and it had become a cliche, uprooted from any concrete meaning.

The Condemned Man’s stay of execution was only as good as the world he had invented.

If that-if our-world seemed, on balance, like a decent place to him, he would let the Condemned Man live and our world would go on existing in his mind.

It just fell out of me, like an intestine that keeps uncoiling from the belly of a wounded animal.

The Magistrate, or his bailiff, has been sighted in the heavens above! He has turned his red eye upon the avout in their concents and rendered his judgment upon them.

Since the military part of town could not tolerate disarray and the commercial part found it unprofitable, all of the chaos had been pushed into the old town, which had become the kingdom of broken plans and improvisations.

I turned my face straight into an onrushing fist.

The expanding sphere forced the man’s foot up, and when it became head-sized his foot rolled right off and my hand came free.

I looked at him like you have got to be kidding but the look on his face was so sincere it made me doubt my own version of the story.

The Scream was definitely a human voice but it was unlike anything I’d ever heard. The only way I can convey just how disturbing it was, is to say that it fully expressed the way I was feeling.

Blinking the blood out of my eyes, I perceived that they weren’t pebbles but teeth.

If I’d been in his shoes, I couldn’t have fired, even to save my own life, because her gymnastics were so fascinating to watch.

“The first shot was to make you freeze,” he explained. “The second was to make you helpless. The third you’re never going to know about.”

All of my injuries began sending pain to my brain, like soldiers sounding off at roll call.

He’d have died of shame to know that I’d been less than totally immune to pain in the presence of these people.

There is no time in an emergence to think up plans. Much less to communicate them.

They showed us the meaning of posture, and pretended to meditate. The cops ate it up.

Not for the first time I was astonished by Magister Sark’s ability to be intelligent and wise while spouting prehistoric nonsense.

“I want to climb on board that thing and go to Tredegarh with you like that water wants to find the ocean,” I said, gesturing to the river. “But to quit in the middle”—just because I’m beat up and homesick and scared—“seems wrong.”

“Some serenity?” cracked Jesry, off-camera.

Through the bubble the Warden’s eyes could be seen moving back and forth uncertainly, responding to inscrutable hisses and creaks from the suit as its systems came alive.

The Geometers understood our engineering, and knew a bracket for a bracket.

“It’s him,” said the woman holding the speelycaptor. “It’s the Warden of Heaven! They threw the Warden of Heaven out the airlock!”

The roads shed lanes, then insensibly narrowed, grew rougher and more tortuous, until without having noticed any sudden transitions we found ourselves driving on endless one-lane tracks and stopping to avoid flocks of livestock so tough and emaciated they looked like jerky on the hoof.

But those lenses—supposing they were there—were guarded by clusters of spotlights, and when I tried to stare into them and meet the Geometers’ gaze, all I could see was explosions of glare held apart by utter blackness.

I borrowed a pair of long-nosed pliers from Cord and yanked my stitches out, then sat in the surf up to my neck until the wounds went numb.

At one point, though, as we had slowly rounded the island’s southeastern curve, and had come to a place where we could look straight up into the yawning rupture in the volcano’s cone, we had seen a separate track, teed into the coastal road, that ran straight uphill for some distance, then veered off into the first of a series of switchbacks.

The question is, can a syntactic device think about things, or merely process digits that have no Aboutness-no meaning-

I guess what troubled me about it was that we, the avout, liked to believe that we were the only long-term thinkers, the only ones capable of hatching plans over centuries, and her scenario envisioned a Dowment in the Sæcular world turning the tables on us.

On the whole the wall looked as if it had been snapped together out of a child’s building toy kit.

The Discipline had taught me nothing of how to cope with such an event: throwing my arms around a dead man.

If we had built our monument by piling stone on stone, building up from the ground, they had built theirs by digging down, a shovel-load at a time.

Being avout was their cover story. And yet it was no lie, for they were as dedicated to their work as any who lived in Saunt Edhar.

They found, standing upright, a cast of his whole body—he even had his head bowed, you know, as if he were looking at the tiles.

But beyond a certain point, the two objectives-that of tiling the whole surface, and that of keeping the curve going- began to conflict.

“I could not see a thing with that. So, my work concerning the aliens had to be based on what I could observe.” “All right,” I said, “what was that?” He looked at me, mildly startled, as if it ought to have been obvious. “Myself.”

Nine-tenths of what you think of as mysterious Lineage machinations is explained by this.

“Meteorologists watching the same cloud.”

‘I see nothing there but vacuum with a sparse dusting of probability waves.’

Your ability to have empathy with the Geometer-to imagine what it would be like to be someone else-isn’t a mere courtesy. It is an innate process of consciousness.

So we have taught this device a little of what we know of the action principles that govern the movement of our cosmos through Hemn space, and commanded it to filter out possibilities that diverge from a plausible world-track.

“I still think it seems fanciful to think we are all the time erecting and tearing down counterfactual universes in our minds.”

I dream of being in the sea, treading water, trying to see a beacon on shore. But the view is blocked by the crests of the waves.

But it’s better to say that those two cosmi exist before the measurement is made, and that they interfere with each other—there is a little bit of crosstalk between them—until the observation is made.

“The variations—the myriad alternative scenarios—have been moved out of your brain and out into the polycosm, which is where they all exist anyway!”

The meteor’s bearing had never changed: it was headed right at us, and the brighter and fatter it grew, the more it seemed to hang motionless in the sky, like a thrown ball that is coming straight at your head.

“If they were afraid of being infected by us, they would not have come here,” Orolo said. “If we are at risk of being infected by them, then we are at their mercy.”

The look on his face was as if he were just on the verge of hysterical laughter.

“Yeah. In the sense that they took a piece of paper with letter-shaped cutouts and held it up to the metal and slapped paint on it.”

“A dead girl,” she said, “with a box on her lap.”

Like a rafting guide hauling a drowned customer from a river, he brought the Geometer out with the full power of both arms and legs, and ended up lying on his back with the alien sprawled full-length on top of him.

The sky fell on us. Or so it seemed, for a few moments. Someone above had cut the shroud lines of the parachute and it had collapsed on our heads.

The billion people watching Sammann’s feed over the Reticulum all knew this. The soldiers, isolated in their own secure, private reticule, had no idea.

“So, if the Geometers wanted to drop something on us at the next opportunity, then now would be the time to expect it.”

A white streak sliced heaven in half, moving west to east, and ending, with no loss of speed, in the caldera of the volcano a few thousand feet above us.

The lava, inflated by the steam, blew itself up into ash, most of which went straight up, which is why everything for a thousand miles downwind ended up buried in grey dust.

For a fraction of a second he was a blossom of yellow flame in the stream of light, and then he was one with it.

It happened all the time that the compromise between two perfectly rational alternatives was something that made no sense at all.

I collapsed back against the wall, sank down until I was all folded up over the drain, and utterly lost control of myself.

Since Orolo had traded the rest of his life for the theorical knowledge contained in the body of the Geometer, preparing it for shipment to Tredegarh had given me an opportunity to show it the same respect as I would have shown the body of Orolo.

“They are far too busy to fit your Anathem into their schedules-don’t flatter yourself.”

Not your normal jewel, but—being that it’s from another world and all—it’s the rarest, isn’t it?

“They didn’t recognize the color of the Geometers’ laser.”

Everything that came down in that probe-all the hardware, all the flesh-is what we would call newmatter, in the sense that the nuclei are put together in a way that is not natural-not in this cosmos, anyway.

My ears caught fire and serrated bristles popped out of my spine. Or at least it felt that way.

“This place is the world capital of know-it-alls. Everyone is jealous. Wishes they’d been there instead of you and a bunch of Lineage weirdos.”

The Geometers looked like us, but were made of matter so fundamentally different that Maroa had entertained the possibility that we wouldn’t even be able to smell it.

“Hostages!” Lio said cheerfully. “Good night, Raz.”

Since no artificial clock-tower could compete with the Precipice, they had built their Mynster at the base of the cliff and then cut tunnels and galleries and ledges into the granite above, sculpting the Precipice into their Clock, or vice versa.

We ran up steps whose only purpose was to support steps that held up other tiers and hierarchies and systems of steps.

I got the feeling one gets only in an especially sadistic nightmare: I was perfectly trapped. Each group had to sing something! I was a group-of one!

It was a way of carrying out computations on patterns of information by permuting a given string of notes into new melodies.

When they got to the end of the sequence, the potbellied one sang a sort of coda that, if I understood it correctly, stated that this was only the latest phrase of a computation that his order had been carrying out continuously for thirty-six hundred years.

I was on my own, back in the mathic world, officially decontaminated, free to pursue my own interests-for two seconds.

Instead I was musing about this funny structure that my loctor and I were standing on: a snatch of geometric plane held in a three-dimensional space grid.

Fraa Lodoghir was off balance for a moment when he saw that his first gambit had failed, but like a fencer, he had a riposte.

“What on earth were you and Orolo doing on the top of the volcano after dark?” Fraa Lodoghir managed, somehow, to ask this in a tone that elicited some titters from the audience.

“Are you trying to say that just because you and Orolo are conscious, and the Geometers are too, that you can learn something about how the Geometers’ minds work, simply by gazing at your own navel long enough?”

“How did Orolo signal the Geometers? What trick was he using to send them his secret messages?”

What was it people used to say of the Rhetors? That they had the power to alter the past, and that they did so every chance they got.

I was alone on the platform, and it was dark; Fraa Lodoghir had scurried down the steps, probably so that I could not tear his tongue out with my bare hands.

“The Geometers have us pinned down like a biological sample on a table,” said Ignetha Foral, after we had served the soup.

I pushed through-it was hinged to swing both ways-and entered the kitchen, a sudden and shocking plunge into heat, noise, and light.

Arsibalt, picking up a huge knife, like a barbarian warlord called to single combat. “This stove, your produce, your cuts of meat—all strange to us.”

I only hope that they haven’t watched so many of our speelies that their minds have been contaminated, and the experiment ruined.

‘I’m terribly sorry, Fraa Lodoghir, but your idea was actually dreamed up by a bug-eyed monster on Planet Zarzax ten million years ago!’

Each of them is as different from the other three, as it is from the matter we are made of.

In Hemn space, any point—which means any string of N numbers, where N is how many dimensions the Hemn space has—contains all the information needed to specify everything that can possibly be known about the system at a given moment.

So what is it that imbues one set of those points—one worldtrack—with what we call realness?

The sets that do, are like an oil sheen, no wider than a leaf, floating on the top of that ocean: an exquisitely thin layer of possibilities that yield solid, stable matter suitable for making universes with living things in them.

They longed for an explanation that would not force them to learn a new way of thinking, and forgot the Rake.

I was drowned out by indignant shushing from Arsibalt and Karvall. Barb turned to me and announced: “They want you to be quiet, because they want to hear what is being said in the-” I shushed Barb. Arsibalt shushed me. Karvall shushed him.

“Fraa Jad doesn’t believe in the existence of time,” Moyra said; but she sounded as if she were realizing it and saying it at the same moment.

We came into a room of flushed faces and bitten lips: a tableau of strained and awkward body language.

“Fraa Erasmas, who discovered Halikaarn’s Diagonal on the world of Diasp?”

Moyra had been edging toward the back door as she tossed these mind bombs into the kitchen, and now almost collided with Emman Beldo, fresh in from escorting his doyn home.

It’s not just about what is possible—since anything is possible in Hemn space—but what is compossible, meaning all the other things that would have to be true in that universe, to have a block of ice in a star.

That’s what a worldtrack is—a sequence of Hemn space points strung together just so, to make it look like the laws of nature are preserved.

In the moonlight these people looked as though they’d been sketched in ash on a fireplace floor.

“Our bird,” he said, “is approaching from this direction. It is radioactive as hell.”

The Everything Killers were only ever mentioned in the same way as we might talk of God or Hell.

“That kind of talk could lead to a Fourth Sack!” I said. “Some people are way ahead of you,” Lio said. “They are saying, ‘Fine. Bring it on. The Geometers will intervene on our side.’”

Lodoghir fell silent, picked up his glass, and doused his flaming vocal chords.

“Do you mean to suggest,” Lodoghir asked, as though not quite believing his ears, “that Arbre might be the Hylaean Theoric World of some other world that has people living on it?”

“I’d best fortify myself,” he explained, to no one in particular, “as I am condemned to spend the remainder of the evening drawing light bubbles.”

If it were detonated, it would shine enough radiant energy onto Arbre to set fire to whatever half of the planet could see it.

But for Zh’vaern to raise the topic in a messal attended (and under surveillance) by Sæculars, went far, far beyond disastrously rude.

“We remember the Third Sack with every bite of food we take.”

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.

“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.”

What the Sæcular Power had asked me to lay plans for-without understanding-was in many ways indistinguishable from a second Rebirth.

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.

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

She let go my hand and began to totter away, shoulders hunched as if she’d just been stabbed in the back.

“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.”

“That ship is patched together from subassemblies built in all four of the PAQD cosmi,” Arsibalt announced. “It is like an archaeological dig.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong: but did you just try to link percolation of information through the Wick to biological evolution?”

Starlight falls on Arbre all the time—even at high noon—but we would never know of the stars’ existence if we slept all night.

They dragged the cube down with them, like seaweed killing a swimmer.

If Hemn space is the landscape, and one cosmos is a single geometric point in it, then a given consciousness is a spot of light moving, like a searchlight beam, over that landscape.

He devoted the last thirty years of his life to looking at a copper bowl.

The full cosmos consists of the physical stuff and consciousness. Take away consciousness and it’s only dust; add consciousness and you get things, ideas, and time.

Consciousness amplifies the weak signals that, like cobwebs spun between trees, web Narratives together.

This is how we get from a solipsistic world—one that is perceived by, and real to, only one subject—to the intersubjective world—the one where I can be certain that you see the copper bowl and that the thisness you attach to it harmonizes with mine.

“He found his way to a cosmos the same as the one he’d been living in—except that in this cosmos the bowl wasn’t scratched.”

The hours of night had not gone to waste, though, for I awoke with ideas and intentions that had not been in my head when I’d closed my eyes.

He stood up and shrugged his bolt off over his head, then tossed it to the floor.

Stop. This is what you call bulshytt. No time.

One is shunted into an altogether different Narrative, and thus causality is preserved.

There is a suspicion, you see, planted deep in the minds of the Urnudans, that with each Advent they are finding themselves in a world that is more ideal—closer to what you would call the Hylaean Theoric World—than the last.

Doing it in the dark squared the amount of chaos, doing it in a hurry cubed it.

“Good to be with you,” he said, “there is no one I would rather be vaporized with, my fraa.”

“I had damned well better get my own stained-glass window for this.”

The risk was greater for her—the risk, that is, that we’d all be lost, and she’d spend the rest of her life knowing she’d been responsible for it.

You could eat these reactors by the spoonful and it would be no worse than eating one of Suur Efemula’s bran muffins.

With the amount of energy it takes to launch a single human, you could get thousands of Everything Killers into orbit.

In a compromise that would have made Ma Cartas kick her way out of her chalcedony sarcophagus and come after them with a broken bottle, they had spun off a thriving side business in the form of a caravansery adjacent to the math, and a ferry across the river.

The pattern of tiles was not merely a mesmerizing, intricate work of art, but a profound theorical statement as well, shouting at me in a language I was too tired or stupid to understand.

He closed with it like a wrestler and ripped off a hunk.

Something about what they did, circa 2760, when the praxis reached its zenith, sent out a signal that propagated down the Wick, and was noticed, somehow, by the theors of Urnud.

This morning, though, the baskets were empty, and Fraa Jad was enjoying his breakfast on a seamless white courtyard decorated with a wandering black line.

The 'gazebo' was a very small one—though, as Lio demonstrated, it was large enough to house one person in a fetal position.

You don’t know the meaning of nasty until you’ve been blindsided by a drifting blob of someone else’s vomit.

Each arm and each leg was built up out of several short, stiff, bulbous pods, stacked like beads on a string.

We all jumped back as something like a giant metal spider sprang out of it, flailing its limbs.

The plans were archived at Saunt Rab’s, and preserved during the Third Sack by fraas and suurs who carried the books around on their backs their whole lives.

Arsibalt was matte black from head to toe, as if he’d been sculpted out of damp carbon.

Everything we knew down here was going to be wrong up there.

Linguistics got me into this excellent mess-only physics can get me out.

I spent the entire journey to orbit convinced that the rocket had failed and that this was what dying was.

A system of cracks split the darkness into quadrants, then expanded to crowd it out.

Those grew blurry as my eyes began to water, and the eyeballs themselves were mashed out of shape by their own weight, like Arsibalt sitting on a water balloon…

I grappled Jules. He was drifting. He was speaking incoherently of cheese.

After that, anyway, I felt better, and didn’t throw up again for almost ten seconds.

The red and the blue payload had merged into a slowly rotating binary star.

For a couple of seconds I don’t think my heart beat at all. Then a jerk backwards told me my grapnel had engaged the netting.

If I lost my nerve and retreated to the balloon without it, my empty-handed arrival would be a death sentence for the whole cell.

If it had been anyone else, I wouldn’t have been able to read their minds, nor they mine.

But now all I could see was the back side of a crinkly blanket, as if I were poultry in a roasting pan.

What were the symptoms after being kicked up a hundred-mile-high staircase by a monyafeek?

“I have powered up the reactor. Avoid the ends of the poles. They are hot.”

In the act, though, it was—as the old joke goes—a whole hour’s work packed into just one twenty-four-hour day.

If we did this for more than a couple of days, we’d re-enter the atmosphere along with the balloon, and there would be a sort of race to see whether incineration or crushing deceleration would kill us first.

But this was like living inside of a jeejah: a super-ultra-mega jeejah whose screen wrapped all the way around my field of vision, whose speakers were jacked into my ears, whose microphone transmitted every word, breath, and sigh to attentive listeners on the other end of the line.

The suit was built to handle just about every excretory function except for crying.

The thing just turned into a rapidly expanding mess of smithereens, and ceased to exist.

The incoming rods drew brilliant streaks across this backdrop, as if chthonic gods, trapped beneath Arbre’s crust, were slicing their way to freedom with cutting torches.

Out of habit I looked at his face-mask, but saw nothing except for the distorted reflection of a mushroom cloud.

The result was not dramatic, but it was perfectly obvious: we saw the tether adopt a slight bow, just like a taut string being acted on by wind.

“I wake up and see you and Jad. But the boundary between waking and dreaming is so indistinct here that sometimes I can’t make out whether I’ve gone from dreaming to waking, or the other way round.”

People live as their ancestors did on the home planet, and may go for days, weeks, without thinking very much about the fact that they’re sealed in a metal balloon being spanked through space by A-bombs.

I found hovering, semitransparent notes that had been posted by diffident avout, writing in perfect Orth, informing me, with regret, that everything beyond this point was pure conjecture.

Good crap would be a beautifully typeset, well-written document that contained a hundred correct, verifiable sentences and one that was subtly false.

He was stabbing it with a screwdriver again and again. From time to time a piece of shrapnel would float away from it, and he would fastidiously pluck it out of space with a skelehand.

“That’ll come in handy when we betray Arbre to the Pedestal,” I pointed out.

It was obvious that such a thing was far too complex to be evaluated in a rational way during a rapid exchange of cuts and thrusts, and so it must be the case that sword-fighters who survived more than one or two such encounters must be doing Something Different.

“Until those things are surgically removed, we are all living, breathing nuclear weapons.”

At the instant when a particular star came into alignment with the tether, he slashed through it with a knife.

I spun and punched another 4.5-billion-year-old rock with the stumpy end of my suit-arm just in time to avoid planting my face on it.

Two miles away-directly across the facet-was a hydrogen bomb the size of a six-story office building.

At first their movement was achingly gradual, but they rapidly picked up speed, sometimes porpoising up, then correcting it with a calm inflection of the wrist, spreading out as they vectored themselves toward different parts of the World Burner complex, sliding with a kind of wicked, silent beauty over the glossy purple-blue rubble plane.

Is it possible that we are a spent delivery mechanism? Like those boosters that threw us into space—to be dumped into the sea?

Sound would not travel through the vacuum of space, but, by shouting loud enough, Jules could excite vibrations in his face-mask that would be transmitted by direct contact into the glass of the porthole and thence into the cosmographer’s ear.

My nose stung, and registered a funny smell: that of something, anything, other than my own body.

“The others regained consciousness in a worldtrack in which you and I are dead.”

Subsystems responsible for irrelevancies such as grieving for my friends, fearing death, being confused about the worldtracks, and wanting to strangle Fraa Jad, were starved of resources.

People were flying in to, or issuing from, it at a rate of about two per second-it was like watching the entrance of a hornet’s nest in high summer.

It moved ponderously, but by the time Fraa Jad managed to draw my attention to it, the thing was already about half closed, like an eyeball slowly drifting into sleep.

The effect was gentle but inexorable acceleration that made our feet spin out to find purchase on the grid.

My vision whited out again, and my viscera caught on fire and melted.

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

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.

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.

I had just seen a glimpse of an alternate Narrative in which we had visited appalling destruction upon one of the Orbs.

Ala was just what the doctor ordered as a way to raise my temperature, and using me as a mattress seemed to be good for what ailed her.

The Geometers’ space suits are soft. Ours are hard. Just imagine.

Hemoglobin is a classy molecule. Finely tuned to do what it does-take oxygen from the lungs and get it to every cell in the body.

“You sent your friends to do what!? While you sat on the ground, safe!?” So it was going to be a private thing between us, I knew, forever.

She believed—better, she knew—that what she’d just reminded me of was true. There were, I was sure, records down on Arbre to prove it.

Our inner ears told us that we were at its lowest point. If we gazed across it to the other side, rather less than a mile away, our eyes gave us the alarming news that the water was above us.

When I saw the five of you, out of your spacesuits, gasping for air, like beached fish, in the observatory, I feared I would never be able to look on a scene such as this one.

The air felt dense, the place closed-in, deadening, stifling. Or perhaps that was just the food catching up with me.

I had turned into Artisan Flec’s speelycaptor: all eyes, no brain.

In its design I recognized the massive, thunderous praxic style—call it Heavy Intercosmic Urnudan Space Bunker—that dominated the look of the ship as seen from the outside.

Opening that ball valve had been a way of putting a gun to the head of the whole Orb. No wonder those soldiers had simply rushed up and blown us away!

“Conservation of momentum,” he announced, “it’s not just a good idea—it’s the law!”

He knew what I knew—which probably meant he knew a lot more than I knew—and he was apprehensive that I was getting ready to blurt something out.

But this place has been sterilized of all that, it’s a technocracy. And the more technocratic it becomes, the more closely it converges on what we are.

They had welded stairs to their sky, and painted them blue.

I thought that I was like a man lame in one leg, who had learned to move about well enough that all awareness of his disability had passed out of his mind.

It sounded like Emman and a couple of other people, recorded and run through a blender.

Sufficiently smart people locked up on crags with nothing to do but think can actually come up with forms of praxis that require no tools and are all the more terrifying for that.

My right arm departed the conversation. Ala had made off with it.

Alone, in the dark, the blue face of Arbre thousands of miles away, knowing in the last moments she’d never breathe its air again, never hear the thousand brooks of the Ringing Vale.

Peace is only compatible with Lise and Orolo being dead—and staying that way.

“The walls of Tredegarh have been brought down. The avout have escaped from their prisons. Ita mingle and work by their sides.”

They have symbolic content. They say, ‘you’re passing into a different Magisterium now, and there are certain things you must leave behind.’

The mystic nails a symbol to one meaning that was true for a moment but soon becomes false.

“Why today? Is this a special day in your calendar?” “It will be after today,” I said. “Day Zero, Year Zero.”

Jesry was up there alone with his machines, like a half-mad holy hermit, watching through goggles as a spot of blinding light crept across a slab of synthetic stone.

Lio and some of the Valers had lost patience, cut the tent’s guy ropes, and swept it off over our heads, like unveiling a couple of statues.

Orolo said that the more he knew of the complexity of the mind, and the cosmos with which it was inextricably and mysteriously bound up, the more inclined he was to see it as a kind of miracle.

Bulshytt: Speech (typically but not necessarily commercial or political) that employs euphemism, convenient vagueness, numbing repetition, and other such rhetorical subterfuges to create the impression that something has been said.

Cnoon: According to Protan metatheorics, the pure, eternal, changeless entities, such as geometric shapes, theorems, numbers, etc., that belong to another plane of existence.

Its general import is that one should never believe a thing only because one wishes that it were true.

The belief is widely held, but unproved, that the complicity of theors in the development of this praxis led to universal agreement that they should henceforth be segregated from non-theorical society.

Incanter: A legendary figure, associated in folklore with Halikaarnian orders, said to be able to alter physical reality by the incantation of certain coded words or phrases.

Lorites are, therefore, historians of thought who assist other avout in their work by making them aware of others who have thought similar things in the past, and thereby preventing them from re-inventing the wheel.

Plane: Used as a verb, utterly to destroy an opponent’s position in the course of a Dialog.

The objects and ideas that humans perceive and think about are imperfect manifestations of pure, ideal forms that exist in another plane of existence.

Their most prominent champion was Uraloabus, who in the Dialog of the same name was planed so badly by Thelenes that he committed suicide on the spot.

Information flows from cosmi that are more “up-Wick” to those that are more “down-Wick” but not vice versa.

“But we’re getting warmer. And now an important thing has changed, which is that you know you don’t know.”

“Now, this is already a configuration space—just about the simplest one you could possibly imagine,” I told him. “And the bottle’s location, (2, 3), is a point in that space.”

But I don’t follow what you mean when you use that word in this twelve-dimensional space that isn’t like a space at all.

'It’s like Saunt Hemn has turned the whole situation inside out.'

The arrow says that entities in the Hylaean Theoric World are capable of causing effects within the Arbran Causal Domain but not vice versa.

Lio reacted melodramatically, sprawling off to the shoulder of the road as if he had been struck by a speeding fetch.

The Wick introduces the notion that our world might, in effect, be the HTW of some other world.

The premise of the story, as well as the simple fact that it is a work of fiction, rule out the use of footnotes.

Embarrassment is something I can feel in my flesh, like a handful of sun-warmed mud clapped on my head.

Lio tumbled backward as if I’d smacked him with a quarter-staff. His feet flew up and spun back to find purchase on the roots of the apple tree.

Lio worried such terms loose from old books of vlor-as if pulling dragon’s teeth from a fossil jaw.

Half of them (the Fendant gargoyles) gazed outward, the other half (the Regulant gargoyles) bent their scaly necks and aimed their pointy ears and slitted eyes into the concent spread below.

The screens were made dark on the nave side and light on the chancel side, so that it was easy to see into the chancel but impossible to see beyond it, creating the illusion that each nave stood alone, and owned the chancel.

He even inspired them to stop consuming blithe, whereupon they became surly, killed him, and ate his liver out of a misconception that this was where he did his thinking.

“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.”

“It depicts us as clowns,” Fraa Ostabon said, a little brusquely. “But… clowns with a sinister aspect.”

She traced her finger up the side of the tablet a few times, running it forward thousands of years in a second.

The sky had hurled itself against the mountains like a sea attacking a stony headland, and spent its cold energy in half an hour.

You might say that the difference between us and you is that we have been infected by a vision of…another world.

The punishment lay in knowing that you were putting all of that effort into letting a kind of intellectual poison infiltrate your brain to its very roots.

As I absorbed that, a gasp and then a deep moan welled up from the floor of the chancel: the gasp, I reckoned, from most of the avout, and the moan from the Hundreders who were losing their brother forever.

Why did I cry out “No!” when I’d known it all along? Not out of disbelief. It was an objection. A refusal. A declaration of war.

The orientation of the M & M suggested that Orolo had been using it to take pictures of an object in a polar orbit, which was unlikely in a natural object.

“I think it’s hiding,” I said. “If it did what it just did in the night sky, anyone could see it with the naked eye.”

Jesry turned and socked me on the shoulder, hard enough to leave a charley horse that would still ache three days later. Something to remember him by.

“Like a fugitive who walks in a river not to leave footprints,” Barb put in.

“I feel like a fool,” Arsibalt said. “When I think of all the things I’ve worried about and been afraid of in my life—and now it’s plain that I’ve been scared of the wrong things.”

It could have been an alien life form, adapted to live in the vacuum of space, that shot bombs out of a sphincter.

“An intuition of the numenous,” Fraa Jad hazarded, “combined with a sense of dread.”

“Wait a minute, you think that they are kills?” Lio shrugged.

“I think it is from another cosmos,” he said, “and that is why they Evoked Paphlagon.”

The tires of the lumber drummon didn’t suddenly get un-worn. The paperwork at the lumberyard didn’t vanish from the files. But now there is a conflict.

The Condemned Man’s stay of execution was only as good as the world he had invented.

“It’s him,” said the woman holding the speelycaptor. “It’s the Warden of Heaven! They threw the Warden of Heaven out the airlock!”

The meteor’s bearing had never changed: it was headed right at us, and the brighter and fatter it grew, the more it seemed to hang motionless in the sky, like a thrown ball that is coming straight at your head.

“A dead girl,” she said, “with a box on her lap.”

For a fraction of a second he was a blossom of yellow flame in the stream of light, and then he was one with it.

Everything that came down in that probe-all the hardware, all the flesh-is what we would call newmatter, in the sense that the nuclei are put together in a way that is not natural-not in this cosmos, anyway.

Each of them is as different from the other three, as it is from the matter we are made of.

“Do you mean to suggest,” Lodoghir asked, as though not quite believing his ears, “that Arbre might be the Hylaean Theoric World of some other world that has people living on it?”

What the Sæcular Power had asked me to lay plans for-without understanding-was in many ways indistinguishable from a second Rebirth.

He stood up and shrugged his bolt off over his head, then tossed it to the floor.

One is shunted into an altogether different Narrative, and thus causality is preserved.

You could eat these reactors by the spoonful and it would be no worse than eating one of Suur Efemula’s bran muffins.

“Until those things are surgically removed, we are all living, breathing nuclear weapons.”

At the instant when a particular star came into alignment with the tether, he slashed through it with a knife.

Two miles away-directly across the facet-was a hydrogen bomb the size of a six-story office building.

“The others regained consciousness in a worldtrack in which you and I are dead.”

My vision whited out again, and my viscera caught on fire and melted.

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

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.

I had just seen a glimpse of an alternate Narrative in which we had visited appalling destruction upon one of the Orbs.

She believed—better, she knew—that what she’d just reminded me of was true. There were, I was sure, records down on Arbre to prove it.

Sufficiently smart people locked up on crags with nothing to do but think can actually come up with forms of praxis that require no tools and are all the more terrifying for that.

Peace is only compatible with Lise and Orolo being dead—and staying that way.

“The walls of Tredegarh have been brought down. The avout have escaped from their prisons. Ita mingle and work by their sides.”

Jesry was up there alone with his machines, like a half-mad holy hermit, watching through goggles as a spot of blinding light crept across a slab of synthetic stone.

Orolo said that the more he knew of the complexity of the mind, and the cosmos with which it was inextricably and mysteriously bound up, the more inclined he was to see it as a kind of miracle.