Neal Stephenson - Anathem

When the ladies were halfway finished rowing across, Jesry spoke up: “Not setting any speed records, are they?”

“Yeah,” Lio said, “I was just thinking the same thing. Give us a boat! We could take ’em!”

It wasn’t that funny, but our bodies thought it was, and we had to do a lot of work in the next couple of minutes trying to avoid laughing so obviously as to create a diplomatic incident. When the boat finally arrived, we took the coffins off, then loaded Lise’s on board. To the accompaniment of more music, those slow-rowing ladies took her in a long arc to the Laterran shore, where she was brought off by half a dozen civilian pallbearers—friends of Jules and of Lise, I guessed—while Jules, supported by a couple of friends, looked on. Then in four separate trips we carried the Valers’ coffins back to the staging area behind the inflatable. Meanwhile Lise was conveyed into the Laterran pavilion so that Jules could have a private moment with her. The oar-ladies rowed back to the Urnudan shore. Fraa Lodoghir and Gan Odru, from opposite sides of the pond, each said a few words reminding us about the others who had died in the little war that we had come here to conclude: on Arbre, the ones who had been killed in the rod attacks, and up here, the ones who had fallen to the Valers.

After a moment of silence, we broke for an intermission, and food and drinks were brought out on trays by stewards. Apparently, the need to eat after a funeral was as universal as the Adrakhonic Theorem. The boat ladies went to work refitting their barge with a table, draped with blue cloth, and arrayed with piles of documents.

“Raz.”

I had been waiting for my crack at a food tray, but turned around to discover Emman a few paces away, just in the act of underhanding something to me. Reflexes took over and I pawed it out of the air. It was another one of those conversation-jamming machines.

“I stole it from a Procian,” he explained.

“Won’t the Procian be needing it?” I asked, my face—I hoped—the picture of mock concern.

“Nah. Redundant.”

The conversation jammer turned into a conversation piece, as my friends gathered round to play with it and chuckle at the funny sounds it made. Yul got it to generate random, profane sentences by cursing into it. But after a few minutes, the voice of Jules Verne Durand—hoarse, but composed—was in our ears telling us that the next phase of the aut was about to begin. Once again we convened at the water’s edge and heard speeches from the four leaders who would be putting pens to paper in a few minutes: first Gan Odru. Then Prag Eshwar: a stocky woman, more grand-auntish than I had envisioned, in a military uniform. Then the Arbran foreign minister, and finally one of the Thousanders who had been hanging around with Fraa Lodoghir. As each of the speakers finished, they stepped aboard the barge. When our Thousander had joined the first three, the oar-ladies rowed them out into the middle. They all took up pens and began to sign. All watched in silence for a few moments. But the signing was lengthy, and so, soon enough, people began muttering to one another. Conversations flourished all over, and people began to mill around.

It might sound like an odd thing to do, but I strayed around behind the inflatable and counted the coffins. One, two, three, four.

“Taking inventory?”

I turned around to find that Fraa Lodoghir had followed me.

I flicked on the conversation jammer, which emitted a stream of profanity in Yul’s voice as I said, “It’s the only way for me to be sure who is still dead.”

“You can be sure now,” he said. “It’s over. The tally will not change.”

“Can you bring people back as well as make them disappear?”

“Not without undoing that.” He nodded at the barge where they were signing the peace.

“I see,” I said.

“You were hoping to get Saunt Orolo back?” he asked gently.

“Yes.”

Lodoghir said nothing. But I was able to work it out for myself. “But if Orolo’s alive, it means Lise is buried at Ecba. We don’t get the intelligence gleaned from her remains—none of this happens. Peace is only compatible with Lise and Orolo being dead—and staying that way.”

“I’m sorry,” Lodoghir said. “There are certain worldtracks—certain states of affairs—that are only compatible with certain persons’ being…absent.”

“That’s the word Fraa Jad used,” I said, “before he turned up absent.”

Fraa Lodoghir looked as if steeling himself to hear some sophomoric outburst from me. I continued, “How about Fraa Jad? Any chance he’ll be present again?”

“His tragic demise is extensively recorded,” said Fraa Lodoghir, “but I’d not presume to say what an Incanter is and is not capable of.” And his gaze fell away from my face and traveled across the milling crowd until it had come to rest, or so I thought, on Magnath Foral. For once, the Heritor of Elkhazg did not have Madame Secretary at his side—she was tending to official duties—and so I walked directly over to him.

“Did you—did we —summon them here?” I asked him. “Did we call the Urnudans forth? Or is it the case that some Urnudan, a thousand years ago, saw a geometric proof in a dream, and turned that into a religion—decided that he had been called to a higher world?”

Magnath Foral heard me out, then turned his face toward the water, drawing my attention to the peace that was being signed there. “Behold,” he said. “There are two Arbrans on that vessel, of coequal dignity. Such a state of affairs has not existed since the golden age of Ethras. The walls of Tredegarh have been brought down. The avout have escaped from their prisons. Ita mingle and work by their sides. If all of these things had occurred as the result of a summoning such as you suppose, would it not be a great thing for the Lineage to have brought about? Oh, I should very much like to claim such credit. Long have my predecessors and I waited for such a culmination. What honors would decorate the Lineage were it all true! But it did not come to pass in any such clean and straightforward manner. I do not know the answer, Fraa Erasmas. Nor will any born of this cosmos until we have taken ship on a vessel such as this, and journeyed on to the next.”

The need for stakes was insatiable. Our volunteers were fashioning them from anything they could find: reinforcing bar cut from buildings that had been splashed across the landscape, twisted angle irons sawed from toppled gantries, splinters of blown-apart trees. Lashed into bundles, they piled up before the flaps of my tent and threatened to block me in.

“I need to deliver those to the survey team on the rim,” I said, “would you like to walk with me?”

Artisan Quin had been sitting in a fetch for six days with Barb. My proposal sounded good to him. We pushed through mildewy canvas and came out into the white light of an overcast morning. Each of us shouldered as many stake-bundles as he thought he could carry, and we began to trudge uphill. Our early trails down from the rim had already been turned into gullies by erosion, so new arrivals were cutting terraces and properly switchbacked paths into the dirt. Hard work, and a good way to sort mere vacationers from those who would stick it out and make their livings at Orolo.

“The first draft of everything is going to be wood and earth,” I told him, as we passed by a mixed team of avout and Sæculars pounding sharpened logs into the ground. “By the time I die, we should have a rough idea of how the place works. Later generations can begin planning how to do it all over again in stone.”