Neal Stephenson - Anathem

“Why do you think a woman would want that?” he wondered.

“Well, no risk of getting pregnant, when your partner is a fraa,” I pointed out.

“That might be important sometimes, but I think it’s easy for them to obtain contraception in this epoch.”

“I was kind of joking.”

“Oh. Sorry. Well…maybe she wants me for my mind.”

“Or your spiritual qualities.”

“Huh? You think she’s some kind of Deolater?”

“Didn’t you see who she was with?”

“Some sort of—who knows—a contingent, I think is what they call that.”

“Those were Warden of Heaven people, I’ll bet. Their leader was got up in a kind of imitation of a chord.”

We had gone far enough that the Decade Gate was lost to view around a curve. I glanced up at the Præsidium. The megaliths rising up from the perimeter of the starhenge served as compass points to help me establish my bearings. We had come to a larger road now, running roughly parallel to the river. If we crossed it and kept going, we’d climb into a neighborhood of big houses where burgers lived. If we followed it to the right, it would take us to the commerce district and we could eventually loop back in through the Day Gate. To the left, it ran out into the fauxburbs where I had spent my first eight years.

“Let’s get this over with,” I said, and turned left.

After we had gone a few paces, Jesry said “Again?” which was his annoying way of requesting clarification. “The Warden of Heaven?”

“Moshianics,” I said, and then spent a while telling him about Fraa Orolo’s interviews with Flec and Quin.

As we went along, the nature of the place changed: fewer workshops, more warehouses. Barges could navigate this stretch of the river and so it was where people tended to store things. We saw more vehicles now: a lot of drummons, which had up to a dozen wheels and were used for carrying large, heavy objects around districts like this. These looked the same as I remembered. A few fetches scurried around with smaller loads secured to their backs. These were more colorful. The men who owned them tended to be artisans, and it was clear that they spent a lot of time altering the vehicles’ shape and color, apparently for no reason other than to amuse themselves. Or maybe it was a kind of competition, like plumage on birds. 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. Their drivers stared right back at us.

“Well, I was oblivious to all that Warden of Heaven stuff,” Jesry concluded. “I’ve been very busy computing for Orolo’s group.”

“Why did you think Tamura was drilling us last night?” I asked.

“I didn’t think about it,” Jesry said. “All I can say is, it’s good you are around to be aware of all this. Have you considered—”

“Joining the New Circle? Angling to become a hierarch?”

“Yeah.”

“No. I don’t have to, because everyone else seems to be considering it for me.”

“Sorry, Raz!” he said, not really sounding sorry—more miffed that I had become miffed. He was hard to talk to, and sometimes I’d go months avoiding him. But slowly I’d learned it could be worth the aggravation.

“Forget it,” I said. “What have Orolo’s group been up to?”

“I’ve no idea, I just do the calculations. Orbital mechanics.”

“Theorical or—”

“Totally praxic.”

“You think they have found a planet around another star?”

“How could that be? For that, they have to collate information from other telescopes. And we haven’t gotten anything in ten years, obviously.”

“So it’s something nearer,” I said, “something that can be picked out with our telescopes.”

“It’s an asteroid,” Jesry said, fed up with my slow progress on the riddle.

“Is it the Big Nugget?”

“Orolo would be a lot more excited in that case.”

This was a very old joke. The Panjandrums had almost no use for us, but one of the few things that might change that would be the discovery of a large asteroid that was about to hit Arbre. In 1107 it had almost happened. Thousands of avout had been brought together in a convox that had built a spaceship to go nudge it out of the way. But by the time the ship had been launched in 1115, the cosmographers had calculated that the rock would just miss us, and so it had turned into a study mission. The lab where they’d built the ship was now the concent of Saunt Rab, after the cosmographer who had discovered the rock.

To our right, the hill where the burgers lived had petered out. A tributary of the river cut across our path from that direction. The road crossed it on an ancient steel bridge, built, rusted, decayed, condemned, and pasted back together with newmatter. A dotted line, worn away to near invisibility, hinted to motorists that they might consider showing a little civility to pedestrians between the rightmost lane and the railing. It was a bit late for us to double back now, and we could see another pedestrian pushing a cart, piled high with polybags, so we hustled over as quickly as we could manage, trusting the drummons, fetches, and mobes not to strike us dead. To our left we could see the tributary winding through its floodplain toward the join with the main river a mile away. When I’d been younger, the angle between the two watercourses had been mostly trees and marsh, but it looked as though they had put up a levee to fend off high water and then shingled it with buildings: most obviously, a large roofless arena with thousands of empty seats.

“Shall we go watch a game?” Fraa Jesry asked. I couldn’t tell whether he was serious. Of all of us, he looked the most like an athlete. He didn’t play sports often, but when he did, he was determined and angry, and tended to do well even though he had few skills.

“I think you need money to get in.”

“Maybe we could sell some honey.”

“We don’t have any of that either. Maybe later in the week.”

Jesry did not seem very satisfied with my answer.

“It’s too early in the morning for them to be having a game,” I added.

A minute later he had a new proposal: “Let’s pick a fight with some slines.”

We were almost to the end of the bridge. We had just scurried out of the path of a fetch operated by a man about our age who drove it as if he had been chewing jumpweed, with one hand on the controls and the other pressing a jeejah to the side of his face. So we were physically excited, breathing rapidly, and the idea of getting into a fight seemed a tiny bit less stupid than it would have otherwise. I smiled, and considered it. Jesry and I were strong from winding the clock, and many of the extras were in terrible condition—I understood now what Quin had meant when he’d said that they were starving to death and dying from being too fat at the same time.

When I looked back at Jesry he scowled and turned his face away. He didn’t really want to get into a fight with slines.

We had entered into the fauxburb where I had come from. A whole block had been claimed by a building that looked like a megastore but was apparently some new counter-Bazian ark. In the lawn before it was a white statue, fifty feet high, of some bearded prophet holding up a lantern and a shovel.

The roadside ditches were full of jumpweed and slashberry poking up through sediments of discarded packaging. Beneath a grey film of congealed exhaust, faded Kinagrams fidgeted like maggots trapped in a garbage bag. The Kinagrams, the logos, the names of the snacks were new to me, but in essence it was all the same.

I knew now why Jesry was being such a jerk. “It’s disappointing,” I said.

“Yeah,” Jesry said.