Since childhood, Erasmus has lived behind the walls of a 3,400-year-old monastery. There, he and his cohorts are sealed off from the illiterate, irrational, and unpredictable secular world, until the day that a higher power decides it is only these cloistered scholars who have the abilities to avert an impending catastrophe.
Neal Stephenson is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the novels Termination Shock,Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. (with Nicole Galland), Seveneves, Reamde, Anathem, The System of the World, The Confusion, Quicksilver, Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, Zodiac, and the groundbreaking nonfiction work In the Beginning . . .Was the Command Line. He lives in Seattle, Washington.
Do your neighbors burn one another alive?" was how Fraa Orolo began his conversation with Artisan Flec.
Embarrassment befell me. Embarrassment is something I can feel in my flesh, like a handful of sun-warmed mud clapped on my head.
"Do your shamans walk around on stilts?" Fraa Orolo asked, reading from a leaf that, judging by its brownness, was at least five centuries old. Then he looked up and added helpfully, "You might call them pastors or witch doctors."
The embarrassment had turned runny. It was horrifying my scalp along a spreading frontier.
"When a child gets sick, do you pray? Sacrifice to a painted stick? Or blame it on an old lady?"
Now it was sheeting warm down my face, clogging my ears and sanding my eyes. I could barely hear Fraa Orolo's questions: "Do you fancy you will see your dead dogs and cats in some sort of afterlife?"
Orolo had asked me along to serve as amanuensis. It was an impressive word, so I'd said yes.
He had heard that an artisan from extramuros had been allowed into the New Library to fix a rotted rafter that we could not reach with our ladders; it had only just been noticed, and we didn't have time to erect proper scaffolding before Apert. Orolo meant to interview that artisan, and he wanted me to write down what happened.
Through drizzly eyes, I looked at the leaf in front of me. It was as blank as my brain. I was failing.
But it was more important to take notes of what the artisan said. So far, nothing. When the interview had begun, he had been dragging an insufficiently sharp thing over a flat rock. Now he was just staring at Orolo.
"Has anyoneyou know ever been ritually mutilated because they were seen reading a book?"
Artisan Flec closed his mouth for the first time in quite a while. I could tell that the next time he opened it, he'd have something to say. I scratched at the edge of the leaf just to prove that my quill had not dried up. Fraa Orolo had gone quiet, and was looking at the artisan as if he were a new-found nebula in the eyepiece of a telescope.
Artisan Flec asked, "Why don't you just speel in?"
"Speel in," Fraa Orolo repeated to me, a few times, as I was writing it down.
I spoke in bursts because I was trying to write and talk at the same time: "When I came...that is, before I was Collected...we...I mean, they...had a thing called a speely?.?.?.?We didn't say 'speel in'...we said 'cruise the speely.'?" Out of consideration for the artisan, I chose to speak in Fluccish, and so this staggering drunk of a sentence only sounded half as bad as if I'd said it in Orth. "It was a sort of..."
"Moving picture," Orolo guessed. He looked to the artisan, and switched to Fluccish. "We have guessed that 'to speel in' means to partake of some moving picture praxis...what you would call technology...that prevails out there."
"Moving picture, that's a funny way to say it," said the artisan. He stared out a window, as if it were a speely showing a historical documentary. He quivered with a silent laugh.
"It is Praxic Orth and so it sounds quaint to your ears," Fraa Orolo admitted.
"Why don't you just call it by its real name?"
"Speeling in?"
"Yeah."
"Because when Fraa Erasmas, here, came into the math ten years ago, it was called 'cruising the speely' and when I came in almost thirty years ago we called it 'Farspark.' The avout who live on the other side of yonder wall, who celebrate Apert only once every hundred years, would know it by some other name. I would not be able to talk to them."
Artisan Flec had not taken in a word after Farspark. "Farspark is completely different!" he said. "You can't watch Farspark content on a speely, you have to up-convert it and re-parse the format.?.?.?."
Fraa Orolo was as bored by that as the artisan was by talk of the Hundreders, and so conversation thudded to a stop long enough for me to scratch it down. My embarrassment had gone away without my noticing it, as with hiccups. Artisan Flec, believing that the conversation was finally over, turned to look at the scaffolding that his men had erected beneath the bad rafter.
"To answer your question," Fraa Orolo began.
"What question?"
"The one you posed just a minute ago...if I want to know what things are like extramuros, why don't I just speel in?"
"Oh," said the artisan, a little confounded by the length of Fra Orolo's attention span. I suffer from attention surplus disorder, Fraa Orolo liked to say, as if it were funny.
"First of all," Fraa Orolo said, "we don't have a speely-device."
"Speely-device?"
Waving his hand as if this would dispel clouds of linguistic confusion, Orolo said, "Whatever artifact you use to speel in."
"If you have an old Farspark resonator, I could bring you a down-converter that's been sitting in my junk pile..."
"We don't have a Farspark resonator either," said Fraa Orolo.
"Why don't you just buy one?"
This gave Orolo pause. I could sense a new set of embarrassing questions stacking up in his mind: "do you believe that we have money? That the reason we are protected by the Sæcular Power is because we are sitting on a treasure hoard? That our Millenarians know how to convert base metals to gold?" But Fraa Orolo mastered the urge. "Living as we do under the Cartasian Discipline, our only media are chalk, ink, and stone," he said. "But there is another reason too."
"Yeah, what is it?" demanded Artisan Flec, very provoked by Fraa Orolo's freakish habit of announcing what he was about to say instead of just coming out and saying it.
"It's hard to explain, but, for me, just aiming a speely input device, or a Farspark chambre, or whatever you call it?.?.?."
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