Neal Stephenson - Anathem

“An actual hotel,” Cord wanted me to understand, “not a casino.”

“Days would go by with nothing—we’d go see museums,” Yul said. “Then all of a sudden they’d get excited and call us back in, and we’d spend a few hours trying to remember whether the buttons on the control panel were round or square.”

“They even hypnotized us,” Cord said.

“Then someone ratted us out to the media,” Yul said bleakly, and cast a wary look round for the man with the speelycaptor. “Less said about that, the better.”

“They moved us to a place just outside Tredegarh, then, for a couple of days,” Cord said.

“Right before they blew the walls,” Yul added. “Then we Anti-swarmed to an old missile base in the desert. I liked that. No media. Lots of hiking.” He sighed helplessly. “But now we’re here. No hiking in this place.”

“Did they give you anything before you boarded the ship?”

“Like a big pill?” Yul said. “Like this?” He held out his hand, the Everything Killer resting in the middle of his palm. I jerked my hand out and clasped his and shook it. He looked surprised. When we let go, I made sure that pill was in my hand.

“You want mine?” Cord said. “They said it was a tracking device—for our safety. But I didn’t want to be tracked, and, well—”

“If you wanted safety you wouldn’t have come,” I said.

“Exactly.” She handed me her pill, a little more discreetly than Yul had done.

“What are they really?” Yul asked. I was drawing up a lie when I happened to glance up, and saw him looking at me in a way that said he would brook no deception.

“Weapons,” I mouthed. Yul nodded and looked away. Cord looked nauseated. I took my leave, tucking the pills into a fold of my bolt, for I had just noticed Emman Beldo emerging from the inflatable with an aide of, to judge from body language, lesser stature. I yanked out my earbud and tossed it aside. Emman saw me headed his way and told the other to get lost. I met him at the edge of the pool.

“Just a second,” were his first words. Around his neck he had a little electronic device on a lanyard. He turned it on and it began to talk, emitting random syllables and word-fragments in Orth. It sounded like Emman and a couple of other people, recorded and run through a blender. “What is it?” I asked, and before I had reached the end of this short utterance my own voice had been thrown into the blender too. I answered my own question: “A means of defeating surveillance,” I said, “so we can talk freely.”

He made no sign that I was right or wrong, but only looked at me interestedly. “ You’ve been through some changes,” he pointed out, making an effort to speak distinctly above the murmur of Emman- and Erasmas-gibberish.

I peeled back my bolt fold and let him see what I’d collected from Yul and Cord. “Under what circumstances,” I said, “are you planning to turn these on?”

“Under the circumstance that I am given the order to do so,” he answered, with a glance back toward the tent.

“You know what I mean.”

“It is clearly a measure of last resort,” Emman said, “when diplomacy fails and it looks like we are about to be killed or taken hostage.”

“I just wonder whether the Panjandrums are even competent to render such judgments,” I said.

“I know paying attention to Sæcular politics isn’t your game,” he said, “but it has gotten a little better since our gracious hosts threw the Warden of Heaven out the airlock. And even more so since the Antiswarm started throwing its weight around.”

“Well, I wouldn’t know about that, would I?” I pointed out. “Since I’ve been otherwise engaged the last two weeks.”

Emman snorted. “No kidding! Nice job, by the way.”

“Thanks. Some day I’ll tell you stories. But for now—just how, exactly, did the Antiswarm throw its weight around?”

“They didn’t have to say much,” Emman told me. “It was obvious.”

“ What was?”

He took a deep breath, sighed it out. “Look. Thirty-seven hundred years ago, the avout were herded into maths because of fear of their ability to change the world through praxis.” He nodded helpfully at where I had tucked the Everything Killers. “Because of clever stunts like that, I guess. So praxis stopped, or at least slowed down to a rate of change that could be understood, managed, controlled. Fine—until these guys showed up.” He raised his head and gazed around. “Turned out that all we’d been doing was losing the arms race to cosmi that hadn’t imposed any such limits on their avout. And guess what? When Arbre decided to fight back a little, who delivered the counterpunch? Our military? The Sæcular Power? Nope. You guys in the bolts and chords. So the Antiswarm has garnered a lot of clout just by doing a lot and saying very little. Hence the concept of the two Magisteria, which is—”

“I’ve heard of it,” I said.

He and I stood there for a few moments, gazing across the elliptical pond at the opposite shore, where processions of Urnudan and Troan dignitaries were emerging from their pavilions, making their way toward the water. The garble-box around Emman’s neck, however, did not know how to shut up.

“So that is the Narrative everyone is working with now?” I asked him.

He looked at me alertly. “I guess you could think of it that way.”

“Well,” I said, “if this thing goes all pear-shaped and some Panjandrum gives you the order to activate the EKs, it’d be a shame if that Panjandrum and you turned out to have the Narrative all wrong, wouldn’t it?”

“What do you mean?” he asked sharply.

“Thirty-seven hundred years ago they rounded us up, yeah. But they didn’t take away our ability to mess with newmatter. In consequence of which, we had the First Sack. Fine. No more newmatter, except for a few exemptions that got grandfathered in: factories where the stuff still gets made, staffed by ex-avout who get Evoked when they are needed. Time passes. We’re still allowed to do sequence manipulation. Things get a little spooky. There’s a Second Sack. No more sequence work, no more syndevs in the concents, except for a few exemptions that get grandfathered in: the Ita, the clocks, the page trees, and the library grapes, and maybe some labs on the outside, staffed by skeleton crews of Evoked and concent-trained praxics like you. Fine. Things are under control now, right? Not much the avout can do if they have nothing, no syndevs, no tools at all except for rakes and shovels, and are being watched over by an Inquisition. Now we’re really under the Sæcular Power’s thumb—until two and half millennia later, when it turns out that 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. So we have a Third Sack—the worst of all, much more savage than the others. Seventy years later the mathic world gets reëstablished. But, you have to ask yourself the obvious question…”

“What got grandfathered in?” Emman said, completing the sentence for me. “What were the special exemptions?” And then there was silence except for the babble coming out of his jammer. Each of us was waiting for the other to finish the sentence—to answer the question. I hoped he might know—and that he might be so forthcoming as to share the answer with me. But from the look on his face it was plain that this was not the case.

So I had to follow the logic myself. Fortunately, Magnath and Ignetha Foral chose this moment to come down to the water’s edge—as it had become obvious that something was about to happen. I looked at them, and Emman Beldo looked with me.