Neal Stephenson - Anathem

Requiem: The aut celebrated to mark the death of an avout.

THE DICTIONARY , 4th edition, A.R. 3000

The darkness was nearly perfect. Arbre was on the other side of the ship, and shed no light here. A new moon, though, was swinging up through the cluttered horizon of the nearest shock piston, strewing faint light by which we cut ourselves apart and sorted ourselves out. Our magnetic boot-soles stuck faintly to the icosahedron, a rubble of nickel and iron. Moving like a man with gum on the soles of his shoes, Sammann made the rounds and checked our connections to the rope/wire.

This facet will remain in darkness for another twenty minutes, Jesry informed us, after which we have to move to that one. I supposed he was pointing at one of the three shock pistons that made up our local horizon, but I couldnt see him. As the Daban Urnud revolved around Arbre, the terminatorthe dividing line between the sunlit and shaded halves of the icosahedroncrept around it. On any given facet, sunrise or sunset would be explosively sudden. Wed better not get caught in the open when it happened, because the citadel-like complexes that loomed over the twelve vertices had clear views over the surrounding facets.

According to my equipment, announced Fraa Gratho, we did not get illuminated by any short-range radar.

They simply dont have it turned on, said Lio. But sooner or later, theyll probably notice the monyafeeks that Fraa Jad cut loose, or the Cold Black Mirror, and then theyll go to a higher state of alert. So, which way to the World Burner?

Follow me, said Fraa Osa, and started walking. If walking was the right word for such a clumsy style of locomotion. Id like to say we moved as drunks, but it would be an insult to every sloshed fraa who had staggered back to his cell in the dark. Much of our twenty minutes of darkness was burned moving the first couple of hundred feet. After that, though, we learned, if not what to do, then at least what not to do, and reached the nearest horizon with a few minutes darkness to spare.

The shock piston was like a pipeline half-buried in the rubble, but reinforced with fin-like trusses to prevent it from buckling like a straw when it was under load. At its ends, about a mile away in either direction, it swelled like the end of a bone and developed into a heavy steel knuckle. Five such knuckles, coming together from different directions, formed the base of each vertex. Each vertex was different, but in general they had been cobbled together from a mess of domes, cylinders, gridwork, and antennae. Extravagant bouquets of silver parabolic horns flourished from their tops, waiting for their turn to gaze into our sun and steal some of our light.

The triangular rubble-field across which wed been walking didnt butt up hard against the shock piston, because there had to be some give in the system; a shock absorber that had been in effect welded to a stiff triangular plate all along its length would not be able to function. Instead the facet stopped ten feet short of the truss-work that enshrouded the shock, and was sewn to it by a system of cables that zigzagged over pulleys. At a glance, it looked awfully complicated, and made me think of sailboats, not starships. But since the Urnudans had been building such things for a thousand years I guessed they had come up with a way to make it work.

Light shone up from the chasm below. As we neared it we slowed, bent forward, and gazed into the interior of the icosahedron, a volume of some twenty-three cubic miles, softly illuminated by sunlight slitting in through other such gaps and scattering from the icosahedrons inner walls and the sixteen orbs. It was all as wed seen it rendered on the model, but of course to see it in person was altogether different. The view was dominated by the nearest of the orbs, swinging by as fast as the second hand on a clock, helpfully painted with a huge numeral in the Urnudan writing system. Id learned enough of this to translate it as number 5. Orb 5 housed high-ranking Trons.

All of my instincts told me to fear the jump across the gap, because if I fell in I would drop for some vast distance before getting splattered on a rotating orb. But of course there was no gravity here, no down, nothing to fall into.

Osa went first, launching himself across the gap and getting himself established on the struts that lent strength to the shock piston. Vay was last on the line. Once wed all made it over, we hand-over-handed our way across the shock out of concern that the snapping of our magnetic boots against its steel would create an obvious acoustical signature. There was a dizzy moment when our settled conception of up and down was challenged by the next facet swinging into view, defining a new level and a new horizon. Then we got used to it and floated across another gap using the same procedure as before. This was perhaps an overly cautious way to travel ten feet through space. But if we all did it at once, and jumped too hard, we might drift away.

Sun was striking the struts we had just passed over as we planted our feet on the next facet of the icosahedron, where we could be assured of a few hours darkness. This was more time than we needed. Or, to speak truthfully, it was more than we had, since we only had an hours oxygen remaining, and the tender was gone.

Two miles awaydirectly across the facetwas a hydrogen bomb the size of a six-story office building. It was essentially egg-shaped. But like a beetle caught in spiders webbing, its form was blurred by a fantastic tangle of strut-work and plumbing connecting it to the vertex-citadel. Indeed, that whole vertex appeared to have no practical use other than to serve as a support base for the World Burner. Even if it hadnt been so enormous, it would have been a difficult thing to miss, because it was all lit up.

Lit up for the benefit of a hundred people in space suits clambering around on it.

Do you think theyre getting ready to launch it? Arsibalt asked.

I dont think theyre giving it a new paint job, Jesry said.

Very well, Lio said. I didnt know who he was speaking to, or what he was giving his assent to. A click on the line suggested that someone had just jacked out.

Our view of the World Burner complex was interrupted, now, by four black-space-suited figures who had broken away from the rest of us. In the dark, with the suits in stealth mode, we could not tell one another apart, but something in the way that these four moved convinced me that they were the Ringing Vale contingent. They walked abreast, with onepresumably Fraa Osaslightly ahead of the others. They were spreading a little farther apart with each step.

Lio? What is happening? I asked.

An Emergence, he reasoned.

When the four Valers were spaced about twenty feet apart, Fraa Osa deployed his skelehands and, like a steppe rider in a shootout, drew a pair of pistol-like objectsthe cold gas thrustersfrom holsters bracketed to the hips of his suit. The other three did likewise. Then, to all appearances, Fraa Osa fell on his face. He planted his feet next to each other and let his momentum carry his body forward, peeling his magnetic soles loose from the rubble. As soon as he lost that connection to the icosahedron, his feet swung up and his whole body pivoted in space until he was prone. And in the same moment he began to glide headfirst toward the World Burner. He was holding both arms down to his sides, pointing the cold gas guns toward his feet, using them to thrust himself across the rubble plane, like a low-flying superhero. Vay, Esma, and Gratho were all doing likewise. In their wake we could see a roiling in the light, like heat waves, as the plumes of clear gas dissolved into space. 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. We were able to see them only in silhouette against the lights of the sprawling complexand that only for the first few moments of their flight. Then they were as invisible to us as they were to the space-suited Geometers swarming over the bomb.