Anathem

Orolo said nothing, which made me embarrassed at the time. When I thought about it later, though, I understood that he didn’t need to say anything because what I’d said was obviously true.

“I happen to disagree,” Orolo said. “But things have changed between us. We are no longer Pa and Fid but Fraa and Fraa, and fraas disagree, cordially, all the time.”

“Thank you but it has certainly felt like a Pa/Fid conversation to this point.”

He meant rather that the evolution of our minds from bits of inanimate matter was more beautiful and more extraordinary than any of the miracles cataloged down through the ages by the religions of our world.

“Violence is mostly about energy delivery. Fists, clubs, swords, bullets, death rays—their purpose is to dump energy into a person’s body.”

when they reached the end of that journey, they found themselves, not in the past of Urnud, but in an altogether different cosmos, orbiting an Urnud-like planet—”

“Tro,” said Arsibalt.

“Yes. This is how the universe protects herself—prevents violations of causality. If you attempt to do anything that would give you the power of violating the laws of cause-and-effect—to go back in time and kill your grandfather—”

“You simply find yourself in a different and separate causal domain? How extraordinary!” said Lodoghir.

The Laterran nodded. “One is shunted into an altogether different Narrative,” he said, with a glance at Fraa Jad, “and thus causality is preserved.”

But it becomes involved with the spatiotemporal world when conscious beings react to their own cognitions and make efforts to communicate with other conscious beings—something that they can only do by involving their spatiotemporal bodies.

The cosmos seems oblivious to time. It only matters to us. Consciousness is time-constituting.

Their elaborate style—shaving the head, performing hours of knotwork just to get dressed—was, I knew, a way of showing respect for those who had gone before, of reminding themselves, every day, just how much work one had to do to get up to speed and be competent to sift new ideas from old.

Except for Jad. “The words fail. There is one universe, by the definition of universe. It is not the cosmos we see through our eyes and our telescopes—that is but a single Narrative, a thread winding through a Hemn space shared by many other Narratives besides ours. Each Narrative looks like a cosmos alone, to any consciousness that partakes of it. The Geometers came from other Narratives—until they came here, and joined ours.”

“If I got interested in meteorology,” Orolo said, “I’d spend a lot of time observing the weather. I would come to have much in common with other weather-watchers whom I’d never met. We would think similar thoughts as a natural result of observing the same phenomena. Nine-tenths of what you think of as mysterious Lineage machinations is explained by this.”