archivelayer

[archivelayer]

Regarding Spiritual Homes

It’s a common misconception that all hidden scholars wander--that all gnosi periodically empty, hermit crab-like, to be resettled by new generations of writers. I’m sure some gnos is weird enough for that, but most aren’t. No, generally only Lamps and Compasses wander the infinite weirdness below. Scholars of the Ink, the Spine, and the Stack stay put.

For those of us who are charged with our years of travel and stack-hunting, the home gnos contains a kind of permanent psychological threat: the knowledge that, at a fixed time, we must leave. Before that point, we spend years at home, studying, learning the myriad ways the Engine can kill you, the handful of ways to avoid the Engine killing you, and as much local archeography as we can. Lamps generally spend eight years in the home gnos; Compasses (charged with the mad task of mapping the Lacuna) get twelve. 

Most of us divide those years between a home on the surface and our gnos (always located in Lacuna’s shallows). We have our daily routines: a walk to the store in the morning, study in the afternoon, mead and darts at the pub in the evening. We work toward our goals: acquiring certifications, building our eventual travel kit, writing articles to be dumped into the infinite maw of the Archive Layer, planning dinners. But something stalks that comforting banality.

Knowing you will leave.

One’s years at home present a constant double-image: the comfort and familiarity of your surroundings layered over with the knowledge that one’s life has been constructed around you leaving those surroundings.

Spectral coronas surround your loved ones. The omnipresent sense of impending loss (though that loss may be years distant) casts even momentary interactions with the sucking awareness of your future. Every glance is at a doomed thing, doomed not to die but to suffer your absence, to continue existing in this place while you exist in another. It’s the frustration of having lost something small and important--knowing that it’s here somewhere, and the only barrier between you and it is knowing where it is--but layered over your vision like a screen. Everything is already-someday-lost, and your experience of it now can only be the ghost of a future absence, a spectral thing clad in infirm reality.

This sensation isn’t unique to wandering scholars, I suppose. It’s mostly awareness of mortality. But there’s something about our institutionally mandatory departure that sets around one’s daily thinking like a slow-setting concrete. It isn’t just in your head; it’s in the air, the conversations.

You’re leaving someday, and you’ll never return. And if you return, it won’t be “you” anymore. It’ll be something else in a you-suit.

And eventually you leave! The double-vision slowly becomes single, now that you’re experiencing home only in memory. The prophecy has caught up with you, and thus, you’re free of it. The places you walk are strange, dark, sometimes wondrous, but they are new, unattached, un-haunted (well, mostly). Home becomes simply a thing within you, departed but maintained, growing fuzzier at the edges and less detailed over time, smoothed like a riverstone by your mental returns. The impossibility of return shifts into a kind of blessing; domestic heimlich can never be un-heimlich’d by a physical return. You can’t go home again--and good thing too!

You have exhorcized ghost haunting your present, leaving only the present. You have left home.

[archivelayer]

Regarding the Returned Descenders

I was talking just now to a student in the elevator city of Isthan and re-realized, in his skeptical reactions, how absurd the subjects of my study really are. My career has led me, across helo-layers and years of research, to study the Order of the Returned Descenders, a scholastic cult based in the lower reaches of the Archive Layer. Like many others, the Descenders are obsessed with Lacuna’s insane, insulting vastness--specifically the y-axis--and their general purpose is almost blase in its straightforward idiocy.

They want to find the bottom, find whatever’s at the core of this colossal waste of cognition we’re all stuck in. So they train generations of students starting at birth for a singular purpose: to find the bottom, then return. The Returned Descender, their messiah, will then reveal the secret transcendence at the core of the world, providing them with the secrets of the universe. They’ll then do all the expected stuff. Cure death, create gold, make marim taste good; transcendence stuff. If that’s where it stopped, they would be unremarkable: another obsessive messianic cult like any other.

The quest is, of course, pointless. The Lacuna is too deep, too mad to be so plumbed. Even could one descend at will, leaping from layer to layer without the months and years of train, elevator, and just-plain-hoofing-it, the layers down eon-deep likely don’t even recognize the needs of organic hoofers. As far as we’ve theorized, matter stops functioning normally past a certain mathematical point, and even lifetimes before that point, one would be fried, frozen, or crushed by the air itself. But none of that stops the other descent-cults either.

The Returned, in their orthodoxy, is a single individual who will help their order transcend physical reality, and this is where they start getting interesting. You see, the Returned Descenders’ ranks are positively lousy with the Returned.

In a messianic cult, false messiahs are a dime a dozen, and since the RDs’ required proof of True Descent are simply token and testament (that is, physical proof obtained from the Bottom and a true account of its nature), it’s not difficult to pop into any given RD cult and claim that you’re the Returned. Show off a foth-tech bauble, describe something alien and mystical-sounding, and you’ve got as much claim to be The Returned as any other Returned.

The proliferation of messiahs got so bad at one point, centuries ago, that the RDs actually created the Culmination of the Un-Returned--essentially a festival of false messiahs. The RDs being a canny cult, they realized that any of the false Returned might actually be the true Returned, and that they risked damnation by rejecting the wrong Returned. So during this Culmination, the RDs honor all their false messiahs as though they were real messiahs, while happily admitting that they aren’t.

As one might imagine, the Culmination’s nature invites, almost demands, the attendance of new false Returned (read: anyone interested in being honored for a week of feasts and fawning). Over time, it became accepted that, when the True Returned arrives, it will be during the Culmination of the Un-Returned, and that the True Returned will be venerated as an Un-Returned, and that, because the Un-Returned are given such lavish honor, the True Returned will be satisfied.

If this seems blisteringly stupid, it is. But, in their logic, it won’t matter how many Un-Returned they built idols to or gave sons and daughters to, because the True Returned will whisk them into bliss. So if a drunk presents you with a bottlecap and a story about the Whiskey Tree that blossoms eternally at the Core of the World, you hoist him onto your shoulder and proclaim the honor of his lies, because what if he’s right? Wouldn’t it be sort of better if we had the transcendence of Whiskey Tree?

I put it to you, gentle reader. What do you prefer? Crushing alien depths, insane in their vastness, cruel in their inscrutability, forever veiled from our eyes, and hiding, unreachable, millennia below us? Or the Whiskey Tree?

[archivelayer]

The Question

There’s a question that has, reputedly, never been asked within the walls of a gnos. You’re warned against it when you arrive, and the question’s total absence is so loud, so prevalent, that it may as well be painted on the walls. That question, the one you hear once and never again (but simultaneously constantly): “What happens to our manuscripts?”

As a Scholar, one writes almost without end. One writes reports, lessons, reviews and critiques, articles, books, series, volumes. One eventually creates oeuvres. And the neophyte wants to know, needs to know, is that question they’re forbidden to ask. It’s a weird little koan, so embedded in custom and courtesy that one overlooks it for years, sometimes careers. 

So? What happens to them?

Here’s what we know. We finish a piece. If it’s solicited, it’s shipped through the Archive Layer to its destination for publication and filing. We do not hear where it will be filed, and, chances are, we will never be able to travel far enough to find it. It will (we assume) be filed thousands of layers down, thousands of sectors away--months’, years’ travel just to find the catalopolis. But it’s published, which is enough.

If it’s unsolicited, the manuscript is carried into the Archives by the scriptarch and we will be notified when it’s found a publisher. More often, though, the manuscript will return to us--simply be waiting in our terminal when we arrive--appended by long letters, occasionally written in our languages, describing worlds of scholarship the manuscript ignores or overwrites. We are provided coordinates and encouraged to resubmit. If the mentors agree that the piece is worth the leave, we pack, give our rueful farewells to loved ones, and try to memorize the architecture of our rooms and terminals, secure in the knowledge that we may not see them again. We depart on years’ long journeys to find those bodies of scholarship we have trespassed or, worse, not read. Years of transit and search follow. We query strange scriptarchs enthroned helo-layers below, sit in carriages for months transiting between stations qe-marks distant, and hope to find sane filing systems at our destinations. When we arrive (if we arrive; the Archive can be deadly), we commence our reading and revisions. Very few of us return to our home gnosi. Those of us who do speak different languages and have display strange habits. Returning scholars pause when they speak, examine the corners of rooms, make strange genuflections.

Such is life as a scholar. We’ve pretty much accepted it, and hey, travel across helo-layers and qe-marks is an adventure! 

But it leads immediately back to the unasked question. When the piece is finished. When it’s been handed to the gnos’s scriptarch. Where does it go?

[archivelayer]

It Contains Multitudes; It Buries Them

Once again, I’m called upon to record the horrors of the North. I really wish they’d stop giving me these assignments, but I suppose, being the only Lamp in the Gnos who’s actually seen the North, I’m the logical choice. Here at the outset, however, I caution that I have not personally witnessed the titular deity, only heard reports from others who’ve seen it. And, given their somewhat shaky sanity in the wake of seeing ICM;IBT, testimony varies slightly from person to person. But here’s the gist.

In the North, a creature the size of a city hauls itself across the landscape on its knuckles. This is the deity-beast named “It Contains Multitudes; It Buries Them.” It has no convenient title, no nom de monstre, just its name. Even its name isn’t exactly a name; it’s more like a description. Nothing else fits. 

The creature is technically quadrupedal, but its hind legs are vestigial and drag uselessly behind its incomprehensible mass. Its skin is stony in both color and texture: trying to pierce it with anything less than a cannon is useless, and even cannons leave no lasting damage. It has many eyes: somewhere between thirteen and thirty, all glossy black and bulbous. It has no perceptible mouth.

But the most notable feature of the beast, by far, is its back. Its back bones form a city: the spinal ridges form hollow towers. The shoulder blades are gnarled ziggurats, stained a perpetual black with the blood of the creature’s sacrificed multitudes. Its hips are a fortress from which sprout savage spears and gory trophies from a thousand internecine wars.

Morphology likely concerns you less than the bizarre origin of its label. What multitudes does it contain? And what manner of burial is appropriate for one’s own internal progeny, especially from an apparently mindless aberration?

The beast crawls through the same rut every season (though the seasons vary in length) in a rough epileptic loop of the North and layering the substrate of that rut is a road of corpses, all birthed and slaughtered by the monster.

In the first season, gray people emerge from pores in the monster’s shoulders. Their eyes are empty, some say the same solid black as the beast’s eyes. They wander through the city, seeming not to recognize the buildings or their functions. The people enter buildings and emerge at odd times. It is unclear whether they have biological needs: if they do, they must be satisfied within the buildings, because the people do nothing in the out of doors besides walk with the same vacant expression.

In the second season, the people move--almost as a single entity--out of the spine and onto the beast’s flanks. The second season is one of war. The people move to the fortresses carved from the creature’s pelvic bones and commence war with one another. Even throughout the frequent slaughters and routs, the gray people’s eyes remain empty of sentiment or thought. Observers liken the wars to marionettes hacking one another apart without apparent emotion. Some suggest that the Multitude’s faces are simply carved, that they are not true multitudes but some bizarre simulacrum. Whatever their clade, the expressionless multitudes bleed like any other organic being.

The third season is the time of sacrifice. One flank or the other will have won, mounted heads--apparently at random, since the multitudes have no generals or kings--on pikes and hooks, and abandoned the fortresses. They move as one to the shoulders and take up positions around and within the shoulders’ ziggurats. If the right flank has won, they drag their captors from the left to the foot of the right shoulder blade, and if the left has won, the left shoulder blade becomes the new city center. Throughout the third season, the captors are sacrificed without ritual or speech. One by one, offerings ascend the stairs, prostrate themselves on the sacrificial platform, and are hacked in two by a knife carved--as everything is--from the monstrosity’s hide and bones. Witnesses of “It Contains Multitudes; It Buries Them” are scarred more by the vision of the sacrifice than even the unrelenting violence of the wars. It is, they say, the sight of a gray person climbing the bone stairs without escort or resistance, lying down at the foot of an expressionless officiant, and being carved in two without the subtlest emotion that haunts them. The eyes of the sacrifice are no more blank after death than before.

In the fourth season, the creature gains its name. In the fourth season, It Buries Them. By this point, the officiant has sacrificed not only the captive army, it has also slaughtered its own people before finally turning the knife on itself and slicing its own throat. By the fourth season, the ziggurat is caked with coagulated blood and surrounded on all sides by foothills of corpses. When the officiant’s blood has mixed with its victims’, the fourth season officially begins, and it is terrifically short. The creature simply shakes--though perhaps “simple” is the wrong word for the shaking of a miles-long beast. In the North, the annual earthquake is called simply “The Burial,” since the deity’s shaking can be felt for hundreds of marks. Once the bodies have been dislodged from its flanks, it makes two further gestures with a deliberation bordering on the ceremonial: it throws two clawfuls of dirt over the ground behind it, giving a peremptory burial to its multitudes. Then it continues crawling its course through the north, digging through centuries, millennia of earlier burials. 

Sometime later, the first season will begin again, and a new population of blank entities will stream from its pores to begin the cycle again.

[archivelayer]

On the border of the urban forest, we found a tote bag full of ancient porn.

At least, we’re pretty sure it’s porn. It’s definitely ancient. The few records we could find suggest that the creatures depicted are engaged in mating rituals, and we’ve never seen paper this glossy used in anything besides porn. That said, it struck us as odd that a pornodex as old as this one would be found outside Fifth Flesh Sector. But books do wander.

No, what really threw us was the tote bag.

Who carries a third-era, one-of-a-kind pornodex in a tote bag? We found the thing in a hallway beside a water fountain, like someone left it there for a moment and wandered away. But even that’s not the strange part. Scholars, on the whole, are a pretty scattered bunch. We’ve all left at least one or two priceless codices on the morning tram. The weird thing is that we were supposed to be the first ones in this particular urban forest for at least three hundred years, and the tote bag is from a conference two weeks ago.

If you know anything about the Archive Layer, you know that it’s inconsistent. Rooms move around, cities appear and disappear as layers shift, and sometimes whole subterranean continents will show up outside your bedroom door. This particular urban forest--which we’d taken to calling Dunce Inane (because it was Pautach’s term to name something, even if his taste for puns is absolutely enervating)--was last seen a hundred marks laterally, thirty marks medially, and three hundred years temporally. Three centuries! And here’s a priceless pornodex sitting by a water fountain, pretty as you please, in a tote bag given out at a conference two weeks ago.

“Sure,” you’re thinking. “You just weren’t the first ones there. Some enterprising group of Lamps or Compasses made it there before you and you’re trying to spin someone else’s moment of forgetfulness into an article or a tract or something.”

Well, my dear skeptic, that’s exactly what Kapsic, Mord, and Oops Revin all said (nearly simultaneously) when I brought the paradoxical pornodex back to the Gnos.

But, my dear skeptic, I’ll tell you just what I told the doubting trio. In my example above of a continent appearing outside your bedroom door, I wasn’t exaggerating. A few mornings ago, when I went to get a coat from my coat closet, I was somewhat dismayed to find my coats replaced by the moving urban forest of Dunce Inane. We found the offending tote a few hours later on our journey toward the forest’s heart.

There’s no resolution here, no answer to the riddle. I found a forest in my coat closet, and beside a water fountain, I discovered an ancient pornodex in a tote bag from a conference I’d attended two weeks ago. That’s what happened. Now we’re having to make a separate trip to Fifth Flesh to donate some ancient porn. And a tote bag, just for good measure.

[archivelayer]

Advice for Travelers Curious About Book Retrieval Kiosks

Have you been inside the automated depositories? Have you seen the hideous speed and precision of the retrieval arms, the perfect, greased glide with which books are shelved? Have you heard the whispers of metal and leather as the central filing apparatus slides texts back into their cages, repeated thousands of times over throughout the warehousing silo?

The archivists prefer we don't enter the automated depositories. They ask us to use the kiosks like anyone else. Ask the sentinel attendant for what you want, hope its algorithmic architecture can find what you want, and wait a few seconds for the machinery to whisk your selection out of its shelf and into the retrieval drawer.

But occasionally, the archivists don't know what we mean when we ask for, say, the Coltrane Files Number Eighty. They find us records of the Coal Trains of the Lower Sixes Sector, an account of the mystical properties of The Number Eight, written by Tran Coltran, or the Files of Numbers: 8-9, Volume 80, which contains a part of the complete list of all possible numbers between eight and nine (the Files of Numbers: 8-9 series is still being printed. It currently occupies several dozen sectors around Corpuscle Grad-Grave with volume 93,424 being the most recent publication. We don't know who publishes the thing. Some obsessed sect, probably). Anyway. Sometimes the archivists don't know quite what we're looking for, is what we're saying. 

So we have to brave the automated depository.

It's not made for mortals, you know. Lots of fast-moving machinery and very few safety mechanisms. The retrieval arms will watch for you, but not the delivery chutes or elevators, so you have to move pretty quickly and try to stay on the ladders in the central airways. Get too close to the shelves for too long and you risk collision with a book moving at only-slightly-subsonic speeds.

When you're in the automated depository, it's important not to look down. It's hard to say how deep the things are--at least the ones in Oltura Gnos--but the circular shaft narrows to a dark point somewhere in the mind-bending vertical depths below you. Every few levels, you can flip ladder segments into impromptu seats, but they're not exactly comfortable. So you do your best to climb down, find your book, and climb back out before you either lose your grip and fall into the textual eternity or get crushed by a book delivery.

Some say that this is how the Archive Layer started. At some point, millenia ago, the whole thing was automated depositories, and over time, the archivists and scholars added concessions to mortal habitation here and there. First a ladder, then flip-down seats, then rest-chambers with cots and facilities, then marim kiosks, then study carrels, then fast forward a few dozen thousand years and you have the Archive Layer of today: library-cities, textual wilderness, cavern-hordes of difference engine plates, whole cultures inhabiting what maybe used to be a bloodless world of text and lubricated metal.

But our point is this: if you ever get a chance to see an automated depository, politely decline. We have one Archive Layer already. We don't need you to make a second one.

[archivelayer]

Yeah. Something like that.

Selected works by Jie Ma, freelance digital and concept artist, mattepainter living in Beijing, China. He working for movie, illustration, album and book covers.

:-)

Make your blog look like a million dollars. Follow us on Tumblr!

[archivelayer]

Bees Holding Church

A woman once told me that, from what she'd heard, the archive layer sounded like bees holding church--a quiet, industrious buzz. It's a lovely image, one I held myself before I joined the Hidden Scholars: reading rooms full of scholars all hunched over lecterns and desks, hunting through ancient tomes and scratching out commentaries and marginalia. I liked to imagine that susurrus and myself at the center of it. Bees holding church.

I'm sure that some Gnosi do buzz, murmur, percolate even, with intellectual activity. Ours doesn't. Ours tends to roar.

Yesterday, when he discovered records of six distinct civilizations going by the ominous moniker "The Founders," Senior Researcher Gurgeal Twinaker literally screamed. Our first thought was that he'd found a cursed book and was being murdered. Then we realized that his death-screams are usually sonorous baritones, whereas this scream was closer to a "young woman is given a key to her first private train car" scream. As soon as "cursed books" was out of the question, we went back to our work.

A day before that, Kabrous and Et Fillii got in a fistfight over the proper West Evoshi translation of "observable." (Both of them are wrong. It's clearly "hebruard," a homophone for "hebrerd," which means "thing you could rub with your corneas." Obvious. But Kabrous and Fillii are both big dudes, so I declined to correct them.) They only stopped when Sheilah Beggermien physically separated them.

I once asked the High Escharch Mosk Biem what he meant by his invocations to the "all-fucked wing-carriers," but all he could tell me was that it was a reference to Historical Eschatography. I only asked because he tends to invoke said "a.f.w.c.'s" every few minutes at unnecessary volumes, and it gets distracting.

I actually went to a bees-holding-church Gnos a few years ago. Everyone huddled around their texts and pneumatic telegrapnels, scribbling and punching keys, whispering and mumbling. It was all I could do not to make a high-volume invocation of Biem's all-fucked wing-carriers.

[archivelayer]

The archives are a little out of date at this point, but once the Scholars return from the Julia Coltrane layers, I'm sure they'll get back to work.

I need more worldbuilding blogs to follow.

If you have a blog that focuses on worldbuilding techniques and/or chronicling a worldbuilding project, please reblog this post!

[archivelayer]

Welcome to the North.

ZONA by Alex Andreyev

Digital art guru, Saint-Petersburg based illustrator Alex Andreyev created a concept for ZONA TV series (based on the short science fiction novel written by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky), to be released in 2015

[archivelayer]

Parable of the Polons

The surest way to start a cantina fight in a Gnos is to ask whether the Polon Structure of the Eastern Voss is originary or reactive. Someone will roll their eyes and answer that Polon Reactionary Theory has been discredited for decades. The Lacuna doesn't rearrange itself for the convenience of some well-meaning colonists--obviously. Then someone else will mention Kaftra Peebl's recent findings in Umberstar'd (the Umberul Emerul shifted layers in response to an introduced subjective presence!)... And then someone throws a punch.

Which is to say, it's a big question. I'd prefer to sidestep it, if it's all the same to you, and offer instead a humbler entry; the Founding Myth of the Gear Woods, as it were. It's not an old myth--around five hundred years--but it says a great deal about how the Gear Clans see themselves. Historical truth averts its eyes in the radiant presence of anthropological memory. So here it is then.

In the days after the gold dome was burnt, we walked east. We carried what we had, and we carried it far. The smoke rode behind us and we marched away from it into the sand. In those days, the Stokers walked their own ways, fed up with what we knew and what we knew but couldn't tell. In those days, we didn't tell stories and we didn't tell lies. The Stokers walked their ways and we walked ours.

Later, time came that the desert ended and our machines left us on the forest's shore. Our parents and their children sat on the sand and looked into the waves of sun-dappled trees ahead, and they asked questions of their elders and their leaders.

What are we to find, hiding between the leaves and drawing muffled breaths behind the trunks?

Where will we grow our crops, and where will we raise our homes?

What manner of Machine lies here? Our fleet-footed scouts reached other shores than these, and we are anxious for communion with our Hollow Clatter-Home.

Whose gods listen for our footsteps, and do our dances test their patience as the Stokers' dances tested ours?

So we sat on the warm sand and we considered. At last we gathered our best daughters and sons and gave them food and supplies and machines. We told them to go into the woods, to think on their families and their Clans, and to answer our questions.

They agreed that they would. They would find the tree-hiders, and the whim of the Not-at-Home, and the listening gods.

We gave them our blessings and told them to think on their families and their Clans, and to stake claims to empty lands that would suit their aging parents, their growing children, their worrying partners.

They agreed that they would. They would set lights in the sky when they found what we'd asked. Light would end what smoke began, and wood would fulfill what gold had failed.

I'll spare you the Naming of the Searchers, since it includes a lot of genealogy and inventory. Anyway, suffice to say that thirty four eager young men and women are selected from the thousands of weary colonists, and strike off into the green cover of the woods.

[archivelayer]

Regarding the Gear Clans

Here's what you've probably heard. After the Gear Clans fled the States at the end of the Aureate Revolution, they settled down in the Eastern Voss and farmed themselves into an early complacency. You've probably heard that their superstitious priests and chieftains forbid access to the Lacuna, apart from rare feast days, and no doubt you've read all about the Lacuna's jealous small gods demands for sacrifice and war. It's all invented, of course. If there's one story that reliably sells papers, it's a good tell-all about the savage customs of the Easterners. But let me assure you, as one who's lived there for a round twenty years, it's all bullshit. True, there are little villages nestled in the forests, cities carved into millenia-old temples, and ranches sprawled across golden savannahs. Orchards and farms stretch to the horizons, and the annual Harvest Pilgrimage is as close to rustic paradise as this scholar's ever seen. The trees are decked with children and speaking-flags and couples always tell each other good morning and goodnight with genuine smiles of affection. Something like that anyway. But--what's the saying from your world? Something about icebergs? The Gear Woods are like your icebergs. The visible portion is insignificant compared to the unseen whole. I think that's what you say about icebergs, anyway. You see, the Gear Clans chose the Eastern Voss for a very particular reason. They could have fled nearly anywhere--to Esraaem, to the Aguilaps, even South to the welcoming arms of the Seca and its half-mad wizard-kings. But they trekked across the Boundary Desert to the hallowed emptiness of the East. Why? Because of the Lacuna. Part of the reason the Sovereign States hate the Great Below is that the accessible portions of the Machine That Powers the World are primarily industrial, never intended for habitation (or even, in some sectors, travel). So when the Little Prince of the Manor wanders down into the Halls of Reverberating Smoke, he is more likely to encounter the gnashing choppers of a reclamation plant than he is to find the cool rest of a shade-spring. And when the Little Prince of the Manor returns with an arm or two less than he had originally, the Parents of the Manor will be a bit wary--or maybe the term is searingly furious--toward the Vast and Ancient Unknowable Mechanism which injured their precious Princelet. The Lacuna tends to have much friendlier surface-facing sectors in the East. Some are clearly designed for habitation, some are simply quiet and empty, and some are under the sacred protection of one deity or another. So the point of all of this--if there was a point--is that people actually live in the Lacuna in the East. And not weirdos in maze-y hotels or wandering cities or whatever. Proper villages, just constructed on the wrong side of the ground (which is to say, the downward-facing side). I suppose I'll ramble more about those later. But try to keep me from talking about the priests. I get a bit carried away when it comes to the Polon-structure.

[archivelayer]

Real Gabinete Português de Leitura, Rio de Janeiro (Photo: Alessandro Roncatti)

[archivelayer]

[archivelayer]

The Coltrane Collection

Sorry we've been gone so long. We found the Julia Coltrane layer and got distracted. Best estimates say that our entire Gnos has been reading for thirty years or so. Time muddles down here, especially when you have literally hundreds of square miles of unread Julia Coltrane novels.

Seriously. Have you read one of those? Classic girl adventurer stuff! Haunted mines, golem trains, henchmen, eccentric scientists--the lot! We--collectively--got pretty tired of reading transduction manifests and alterior-layer shift reports (articles to write, you know). It makes us bad scholars, but we'll admit it. Transduction manifests are dreadful, and a.l.s. records are dreadful, and writing articles about the intersection of transductionality and alteriority is the most dreadful. So you can forgive our excitement when Scholar Bors burst into the typery where we were--collectively--writing, and shouted that he'd found them, he'd found them, he thought they were just a myth but he found them.

We asked what he found.

He just glimmered a little. Seriously. It wasn't a trick of the lamp-light. We're pretty sure he glimmered.

Then he led us down hundreds of layers--further than any of us--collectively--had ever been before. And we stepped out of the elevator, and we all--collectively--just stood there and glimmered for awhile.

There were shelves of them. Bright oak shelves of unopened Julia Coltrane novels. Thousands of them. Millions of them. Novels from all fifteen thousand some-odd Julia Coltrane series. The fifteen million page "Looped Circles" mega-novel that even the maddest scholars only dared whisper, right down to the Junior Specialist Coltrane series for age-reversed children (who had grown weary of the wars of their adulthood, but also needed a fourth grade reading level). We found them. They were real.

As we stood there glimmering, we all--collectively--admitted that we wouldn't mind spending a few hours just relaxing here. We deserved a break, didn't we? And here were books, fresh unbroken spines, heady smells of ink, that--who knew?--maybe we'd write articles about someday.

We suppose, looking back, that that was a bit of an excuse. We admitted that to ourselves after a few years of reading, but once you've started the Golden King Series, you can't stop until you've read at least the first thousand books (it does, to be fair, drop off a bit in quality after In the Golden Temples of the King. Most reviewers agree that the shift into blank verse was an odd choice. But they pick up again in Gold|God, when Julia finds that the Golden Emperor is--actually, we won't spoil it for you. It's pretty great, though.).

So that's where we've been.

Actually, that's where we--collectively--in all likelihood--still are. We sent this message back up to the Gnos with Holbein when we realized that our friends and families might be slowly dying off. But everyone knows that you can't read the Golden King series without the elucidation provided by the Slaughter Sisters Cycle, and it won't take long to get through those. And maybe the Slaughter Boxes. And the Beatrix Slaughter Archive Collections.

Holbein, make an excuse. We're busy.

[archivelayer]

Merry Clos-Nok Nabo!

Merry Clos-Nok Nabo!

Just about now, the children will be donning their masks and hoods and pouring into the streets, a great crimson tide of cloaks and shining eyes. They'll be dashing into the upper reaches of the machine--already tidied made safe--hunting clos-kin. Legend goes that the clos-kin are near-sighted and can be fooled by canny children wearing the mask and red cloak of the clos-kin. The little sentinels, it's said, will give their gifts away to other clos-kin who ask.

The children are hunting clos-kin in the Lacuna, but no one's ever caught one.

Well, two years ago we heard Mult Kaborsta cry from a balcony that he'd found a clos-kin. But we couldn't find him when we looked. Then last year, Ella Rakham said that the clos-kin who visited her family walked with Mult's unique lurch. But Ella does tell stories.

The clos-kin visit us once a year on the same night--Clos-Nok Nabo--to leave gifts and fix broken things. Children, our parents tell us, are often broken. Children are supposed to do their chores, obey their parents, never stray into the engine. Children who don't? They're broken.

The clos-kin fix broken things.

Last year, Piriam Stak's boiler broke just before Clos-Nok Nabo, and he couldn't heat his shop's forge. He worked and worked, trying to mend the thing, until he fell asleep. When he awoke the next morning, somehow his boiler was churning, and his forge was already hot and waiting! The clos-kin fix broken things.

Two years ago, Lady Mueller's son Patren tried to throw the dog off their manse's parapet. When the dog escaped his grasp, Patren settled for throwing his mother's vanity off instead. The thing smashed a neighbor's walker so badly that Patren's parents had to pay to replace it. On Clos-Nok Nabo, the Muellers locked their doors, and the Lord and Lady Mueller muttered to each other that maybe they would like to see Patren fixed up by the clos-kin. When the morning came, Patren was nowhere to be found. Last year, the Muellers told us with shaking voices that a little clos-kin, hunched under its red cloak, had stood outside Patren's old window, turning its head this way then that, as if trying to remember something. In the morning, they found a vanity sitting in the middle of their drawing room. The clos-kin, we whispered, fix broken things.

On the eve of Clos-Nok Nabo, the children wait at their windows under their cloaks and masks, watching for the clos-kin. If a house is broken, the clos-kin will fix it. If a house is dirty, the clos-kin will clean it. But, if a house is clean and in good repair, the clos-kin leave gifts. We wait at our windows to catch glimpses of them.

At midnight, the clos-kin appear. They slide out of grates and hidden doors, bent under their heavy sacks, wide eyes glowing gold. The blue moonlight dyes their crimson cloaks purple, and they steal through the streets on snow-padded feet toward their destinations. Clos-kin never use the doors. One moment, we lose sight of them under our sills, and the next moment, we hear the tiny sounds of metal and stone clicking and purring in the rooms around us. Then they are gone, padding back into the Lacuna, back to their god. Back to the Clos.

In the morning, we sing songs and give gifts of our own. We count ourselves lucky, in our quiet moments, that we were not broken enough to be fixed by the clos-kin. But we quickly forget our fears. Our parents have gotten out the candied meats and orchid preserves that they swore they didn't buy, and they are setting the table for our afternoon feast. We're happy, all day, that we are not broken--or at least, not quite broken enough to be fixed by the clos-kin. We will try to mend ourselves in the coming year.

For the clos-kin fix broken things.

[archivelayer]

And a library below that, and a library below that...

A man browsing for books in Cincinnati’s cavernous old main library. The library was demolished in 1955.